The Best Australian Poems 2011 (13 page)

Me and the young guys cough how women

flirt crude just like us.

We are the few who
get
them,

that's our boasting.

We know they want to love us heartfully

but have hard bargains from which we shy.

We call one over like an interview –

her of us as much as us of her.

‘Far too homely,' we smirk

into our laughing-gas drinks.

‘She'll make someone a nice first wife.'

Wife's
not the point, we jibe:

tonight we're trifling from behind our Marlboros.

She is a form of money. We four would divvy her

if we were kinked that way.

The most neon our eyes can be,

the most muscled our smiles,

must lever her into decision:

is she Brad's tonight or mine?

Richo's or Hobbsy's?

The air blind and deaf with indoor night

and tom-tom bourbon.

My tactic, being older, is to offer her my seat,

bow too politely to be genuine,

and wish there were no laws to this,

that I could rip and lick right now

without remorse or evidence or bruise.

For months Mozart has been so crucial I haven't played him.

The winds, filibustering the house, have heard

the chimney crackle and the paint strain

while the old obsessions went ignored. What was the point?

One evening I flipped the LP of the A major (K.488)

and the slow movement lacerated my defences

all over again. I squinted beyond the buddleia

on the fenceline and thought I could discern vast citadels

circling the horizon, and it was almost a joy

that swept its andante through the sad molecules

of my imaginings – but just then

a magpie alighted on the lawn, dragging a shadow

behind it as the sky turned a molten gold and a storm

broke from the west. The disc had ended

(I had no recollection of having heard the rondo finale)

and I sprang to the phone, jangling churlishly

to tell me you were gone. Music is like that:

it knows. It brought to mind what you had shown me

on the Baltic coast under the lighthouse:

twirling a miniature sailboat of souvenir amber

between thumb and forefinger, you pointed to the tower

and the encircling gulls and ‘Look at them,' you said.

‘They love the lighthouse. It teaches them the humility of flight.'

The old pesticide factory

casts a buzz-saw shadow

on the wall of the council chambers.

Inside, the poets sit like aldermen.

They talk of war and genocide,

harrowing themselves silly.

At night they retire to soft floral sheets, flocked wallpaper. They dream

infinite shelves of books with tilted spines –

M and N shapes staggering away;

leather the colour of blood.

where's my rattan overcoat? i have

things to say tonight at the basket

weaver's AGM! how find anything

for that matter in this dish of haste!

i never thought my collection of toothpicks

could take up so much room! where's

my snail shell rimmed spectacles

my echidna gloves! maybe i should

resume my search at high tide!

can i find my snakeskin snorkel!

here's my sunglasses made of smoke

now that's a find even though summer

is over & glaring at someone else

burning the edge of their rock pile

That he who distributes charcoal during a snowstorm

              is a fine fellow, and that to be

like a tree which covers with blossom the hand that shakes it

              warrants careful attention, and that

ice will not lodge on a busy spinning wheel –

              all this is common ground. Also,

to strike at the stars with a bamboo pole is the same

              as to dress in brocade and stroll in the dark,

or to offer a twenty-one-gun salute when the general

              has clapped spurs in his horse and departed.

 

And yes, pride is a flower from the devil's garden,

              and a well-groomed heart is a good match

for any well-groomed head. Repentance, they say,

              is the loveliest virtue, at least for a while:

and is it not odd that marriage is an assembly

              of strangers, and love an inscrutable monster?

My cousin has bought a farm and I have heartburn:

              but still, with my couple of loaves, I remember

to sell one and buy a lily and, nibbling

              a bamboo shoot, to bless its grower.

 

One hair on a pretty woman's head is enough

              to tether an elephant, but it's the creatures

that swag the knowledge home, as that the sunstruck

              ox pants at the sight of the moon,

that there's one phoenix to every thousand chickens,

              that a wren trying to walk like a stork

will break his crotch, that business is best done

              slow and steady as the cow slobbers.

No end of wisdom: but what does a frog

              in a well know of the waiting ocean?

a line across a plane

a city marked in water and eucalyptus

an efficient takeover

a funnel web enters a sock

 

and at the edge of sea bondi's child

all hands and tongue sand in mouth

gathers the movement

of starfish and snails anemone and cuttle

 

an observer, unable to utter, takes place

a voice, silently present, observes

this child etched in salt and breath,

the child thrown up onto the shore,

the nets thrashing with slow death and light.

Last Christmas

Your father did his impression

Of a Chinese person

Your mother wore a see-through dress

And served up salad

Made of grated carrot and sultanas

Your brother gave us tickets

To the monster trucks

Then his allergic children

Who were high on cordial

Knocked a bottle of red wine

Into my lap

Everybody laughed and said:

‘What are you going to do, Adrian?'

‘Go and write a poem about it?'

The pig propped his hooves on the seat back and lifted the beer to his mouth. His toes, he saw over the translucent lip of the plastic cup, were perfectly clean if mottled in colour like the earth. The baying and howling intensified, and he turned his attention to the pitch. The raccoon dealt with the first ball, tossed hard in the lull following the crowd's jeering. The ball rolled dead. A rat retrieved it, spat on the red skin and briskly rubbed it on the hairless skin of his groin. The next ball curved like the smell drifting from rot, and the racoon was out. Plastic cups flew up into the sky and down again like scuttled locusts. It had happened so quickly. As the pig watched the racoon remove his helmet and return to the pavilion, he was momentarily unsettled. How fragile things seemed. How would they fill out the afternoon? The game, though, soon became robust and quite ordinary. The pig might have dozed off, for time passed. When he woke there was a commotion beneath his grandstand. The pig looked down into the bay. An old emu lay on its back in a concrete aisle littered with plastic cups, cigarette butts, pie bags and piss stains. Two paramedics, grey wolves, knelt over him. One had its paws buried in the oily feathers on the emu's upturned and distended chest. The bird's legs hung from each side like snapped sticks. There was a small and miscellaneous crowd. Then from the other side of the arena, with a great wailing and roaring, came another wave of plastic cups, catching the sun, hovering and shimmering like angels. The partnership on the field had been broken. The pig found himself hurling his own empty cup into the teeming oval of the sky. When the pig finally looked down at the aisle below, one of the wolves, its fur hoary as the grubby cement, had fetched a stretcher. Only the pig saw the wolves carry the large dead bird away.

After the silent removal

after the silt in the drain

after all that you'd hoped for

deftly excised from your brain

after the cat's been looked after

and the dog euthanised and the girl

who fed it on biscuits and munchies

quietly removed in a van

and after the garden is watered

and after the Rates are all paid

and after the roof is repaired

and the guy who's been screwing the maid

and the maid make a suitable marriage

and their kids have all fled from the land

and after the land has been conquered

by carbon dioxide and drought

and the unions are running the government

beyond a shadow of doubt

and the price of energy's rising

and the internet choking on smut

whose quality is as depressing

as the Stock Exchange in full rout

there will rise from the desert a something

we'd be probably better without

which will amble off into the cosmos

and turn the lights out

It is not the world which passes our long-legged, small table

outside the Cave d'Aristide where we have hoisted ourselves

to settle on the slightly too-high stools.

 

With my dark glasses and light air,

my T-shirt striped horizontally, the image I am striving for

is more
faux Français
than
vrai Palavasien
.

 

Irony! Somehow this village condones its ease.

No, it's not ‘the world', certainly not as literal

translation, but it's more than fellow-tourists,

 

who are few despite the excellence

of the picpoul de pinet, the beach, the sunlight,

the exchange rate and the mussels.

 

This spot, right on the corner

of Rue Aristide Briand,

is perfect for remembering his victims:

 

Paul Boible, railway worker, before the court

in 1910 for carrying a prohibited weapon,

to wit a corkscrew, the thousands

 

who tore up their mobilisation orders

and mailed the scraps to Aristide, the Paris sparkies

done out of their jobs by soldiers.

 

Ah, Aristide, it was Emma Goldman

who countered your scream of ‘sabotage' with,

‘Who but the most ordinary philistine will call that a crime?'

 

If there was a wine bar on some Rue Emma Goldman

somewhere, I'd be drinking there with the
cheminots
,

and Paul Boible would pull my cork.

 

But for now it's Aristide, and the sun sets

as the shopkeepers' kids play in the street

and I turn to my Mas de Daumas Gassac '06

 

and ask myself how ordinary a philistine I am.

Aristide, you were the prototype

for Chifley, Blair, all the Social Democrats

 

who (let's be kind) spun themselves into

contradiction. Were you, were any of them

aware of this? Here, on my stool,

 

(no armchair Marxist!) I can contemplate

not just the passing ‘life', not just the wine,

but how my hedonism and my history

 

have put me here, my feet just off the pavement,

glad of not having to strike for five francs a day

and with the luxury of pretending to pretension.

If the wail that whips around the valley

continues north, past the headland

the village mothers cross themselves

their broods safely south, they think.

 

Today a hopeful, hopeless rock fisherman

is washed into the greedy sea, or else

a holidaying tycoon has popped

an artery on the sodden golf-course –

 

their companions invoke

the snaking needle of sound, drawing in

the red flashing lights and the grim referees

already poised to call the game.

Down the rabbit hole, we find

a world of cottage cheese and over-inflated

princedoms. That joke was thirty years too late.

Sitting there on the piazza

between the banana trees and austere flamingos,

we conjecture convivially on the poet's last fuck –

ing stand. He's got beautiful cheeks,

              beautiful eyes,

                     beautiful thighs. And yet, he still

couldn't rate with a tardis. Between anthropomorphic stars

and unfamiliar history, a garden gnome quartet

practises dub karaoke and pert variety singers

live high in the grass. What price Russian formalism?

How unusual can an everyday poem be? These things,

wrestled with a knife and fork, remember Jameson.

We take what crumbs that sparrows throw us

and discuss the code of the West:

              common sense, Coalcliff, occasionally Coltrane.

That night you had the illness poem real bad,

coughed your guts up and took inclement gigabytes,

washed down with lachrymose love-notes from Spicer.

                            Hyperventilate now!, you said,

I can't find my postoffice. Was it a postoffice,

or just a plain old pawnshop? Sometimes we just

don't get history, or history doesn't get us. Say, haven't I

heard that before? Circularity breeds

stove-top despair, the coffee always spills twice.

Say hello to muffin-tops, good morning high-quality buns,

these baked goods so leavenly cool.

Oscar remonstrates with Shklovsky and finds a

substitute in Ken Brown:       what a gambler!

And as we drive back south, we become

       part of the Great Tradition. Thanks Mum, thanks Dad,

              thanks Pam, Ken, Laurie, and the whole damn gang –

Rae, Denis, Tom, Barbara, Micky, Kelen, Alan, Erica,

              Kate, Leigh, Sal, and Kurt. (Ella, make a note!)

 

In the distance, someone waves, a touch sad.

              Athol don't be blue, be a marine aid,

              and watch over the incessant bridal parties,

              still caught in baby's breath and the last sure spray

                            of the twentieth century.