The Best Australian Poems 2011 (7 page)

In the night, the gorging begins

again, in the spring

night, in the branches

of the Moreton Bay figs,

that are fully-rigged

as windjammers, and make a flotilla

along the street.

And from the yard-arms

are strung clusters

of hanged sailors,

canvas-wrapped and tarred –

these are the bats, come

for the split fruit, and dangled,

overturned where they land.

It is the tobacco fibrils

in the fruit they seek,

and those berries, when gouged,

are spilt, through the squall

of the crowd, like

a patter of faeces

about the bitumen. This amidst

the cloudy shine

of the saline

streetlamps. In the ripe nights

the bats fumble and waste

what they wrest –

there's a damp paste

upon the road,

which dries to matted

sawdust, soon after the day's

steam has reared; it is scraped

up by the shovel-load.

The bats are uncorked

like musty vapour, at dusk,

or there is loosed a fractured

skein of smoke, across

the embossed lights

of the city. The moon is lost,

to an underhanded

flicked long brush-load of paint.

You think of the uncouth ride

of the Khan and his horde,

their dragon-backed shape

grinding the moon

beneath its feet.

And then, of an American

anthem, the helicopters

that arrive with their
whomp whomp

whomp
. I'm woken

by the bats still carrying on

in the early hours,

by the outraged screech,

the chittering

and thrashing about

where they clamber heavily,

as beetles do, on each other's backs.

They are Leonardo

contraptions. They extend

a prosthetic limb,

snarl, and knuckle-walk

like simians, step

each other under

and chest-beat, although

hampered with a cape. In sleep

I trample the bedsheet

off, and call out

‘Take that!' (I am told),

punching the pillow in the heat.

I see the fanged shriek,

and the drip

of their syringes,

those faces with the scowl

of a walnut kernel.

It's some other type of bat

I think of: these, in books,

where I looked them up,

have a face you can imagine

if you recall how you'd whittle

finely at a pencil

and moisten the lead

with the tongue-tip –

a little face that belies its greed,

like that of an infant.

All partly autonomous things

trample others down,

even what is their own,

and the whole earth throbs

and smoulders

with pain. No comfort for us that

in the nights I have seen

how the living pass

about the earth,

that is deep with the ashes

of the dead, and quickly, too,

vanish into dark,

like will o' the wisps

thrown out of the sun.

At three o'clock I gather

our existence

has been a mistake. I would like

to turn my back on

its endless strife;

but when I look out

at the night, I am offered

otherwise only

the chalk-white, chaste

and lacklustre moon.

The mathematician rises

to explore parabolic form

the Rex cat sleeps

 

Purl wave ever

the stylish beehive

bum in my face

 

Bred into delicate

frame… running true

the Cornish wrecker

 

In Hearty Street

where two or three

may gather

 

Merly the Rex

is assuredly in

the midst of them

He plays an old cicada-shell guitar

his belongings dishevelling a faded blue blanket.

 

A tape-deck, a pink ice-cream bucket, a tattered glove

(falconer's or biker's?), its leather scarred by talons (gravel?),

 

and his white Chihuahua elegantly avoiding all eyes –

disdainful as a mannequin to out-mannequin god.

 

Shopfronts were passing like a glance, a glassy shrug

and I noticed the slithery rail in Brave where dresses hung

 

like marked-down lungs. I photographed the dog's silvery fur

his hand-knitted jacket of dark arguing wool

 

snug around torso and haunches – drop-stitched, ragged –

it was a cold winter day to be busking outdoors

 

near the florist, near the pet shop, near Coles.

Each time the busker played Clapton's ‘Layla',

 

the dog's ears twitched with minuscule approval.

Kaiser rolls were steaming in the Daily Bell bakery

 

but like Pierrot's chiens savants, the Chihuahua was guarding

his master's alms: a demi-baguette, a pink ice-cream bucket

 

of coins; and the glove tossed on a pale blue blanket

like a hand begging all alone on the sea.

At last, she thought, looking back

through the train's jiggling window,

seeing the Italian countryside

like a Giorgione landscape.

But what was this ‘at last' –

it was hardly being here

away from family and domestic routine,

though, it's true, she'd longed for that;

for an absence of needing to be

what others required.

And it wasn't this sense of space,

the chance to do as she chose –

yes, she enjoyed it,

looking forward to the galleries

and canals of Venice – the dank smells

and superb gilded horses of San Marco.

No, this sensation was like vertigo

or the stomach dropping into space

on a steep climb –

thinking of the man she'd meet.

It would be ordinary enough

but it would be her own, entirely,

not possessed by children

or the years that had smoothed her marriage

so that even arguments

had lost their heft.

She remembered it –

how once they'd been at loggerheads

for two days, and on the third, had made love

and had barely known each other

or themselves. She'd wanted to keep that –

the not-knowing, the animal life

that had risen. She had wanted

to stay strange to herself.

– Gran Lago, Nicaragua

 

I find him down by the boathouses,

a white-haired mystic with canine rhythm.

He paces and paces doggedly

and has a zoo look to his face.

His chain leads down from the soursop tree

to a pat of trodden mud and dung

where he guards a pool of runoff

and stares at his face in the gasoline.

He is a pet of one of the boatmen

whose blue and green covered craft

ferry tourists to Las Isletas.

I have travelled out there once

and seen his brethren

swinging high in the balsa trees.

In neat black caps and sheepskin

they hung like anvils in the flowers,

ministering deftly to each other

with fingers fine as Julieta cigars.

Like a penitent I approach him

and offer fruit to his terrible intelligence,

a few lime oranges from my bag

dropped into his calabash.

He turns his pink features to the sun

and shuns my offering, curling

his lyre-bird tail around the leash.

Here we are too far from the islands

and there is nothing I can do for him.

He looks at me with a mendicant air

and dips his paw into coconut cream,

then unhinges a long low howl on needled teeth.

His is the last true religion.

He practises sermons too green to transcribe

on the subject of the Sandinista revolution

to an early choir of sandflies,

then screams like the devil as the boats come in

and packs of gulls on the shoreline

carry on their cheerful scavenging.

My mother brought home

the strangest creatures:

a lamb wearing a big white diaper;

a blind raccoon;

a wolfhound with a broken

hip, spooked by birthday balloons –

 

Then there was Mary Lou.

Two hundred sixty-five pounds and bruised,

she held a big leather purse,

drank diet pop,

smacked pink gum

and went to the movies alone.

Mother called her a Godsend.

 

Next, it was Lucy, a little girl

my mother gave violin lessons to

and called
daughter
.

Lucy wore her hair in a bob, took

over my old bedroom.

And then she moved

to sleeping next to my mother,

close to her under the covers

at night, holding her hand

in the big brass bed.

 

Soon mother kicked all of us out –

gave the seven sick cats

to my sister, found

my father a gritty flat, and took

his van keys. That's when she

brought home the man who beat her,

the Chinese man who broke her nose,

and pushed her all the way down

the shiny maple stairs.

Dear mam last night

We drank a bottle of Tasmania

       I love you a lot only less so

              Pidgin monarch, belligerent fairy

Stone St Kilda the crone 'til she moves namore

 

We would waft 'cept for the human

              Gravity of density

Rich phlegmatic lungs of autumn belief

       The leaf's concerted flambé,

Black edg'd and separate

                     Digitalia, heaped raunch

Impressionism as we were driven through

       By our pudgy headmistress, whom we tricked to admitting

‘I want to be adored.'

 

Territory and plague :TA CHUANG

Vigorous strength, thunder, arousing heaven

 

       The rude tunics of the tiny army

Suck into the hollow

                                   Like degenerate dwarf song

Vespers of dusk come on – Monteverdi –

Where gods crawl through trumpets to get here

O mystery gizzrd,    O flunking west!

       O copper boned sopranos of Heidelberg!

Old French
superflueux
by my thin Red-

       thornproof hand

 

More than temples we'll have left

Wilderstrawberry   shits

                                      Across Gaul

       My coo lipp'd rare

                            hipp'd Prospertine

I'm ovrly fond of the weeds where your street crosses

       my own   your original rigor pasted and pretty

                                   as barbiturates

ride

isobars of clutching muscle

              that on odd days

 

ferry us to orgasm.

Some people hang these crystals in their homes and cars.

This is called a cobra hood, you can do it silently.

MySpace, yes, Kenny and the Elephants, but who cares?

So these beads are pretty too.

I'm great and

I'm really interested to know you, FUTURE HAPPY BUDDHA.

 

A zinc finger homeobox transcription factor

acting late in neuronal differentiation:

fake Kenny Rogers Head. Macrobiotic, of course.

So if I was to dig up all these rocks,

I would find dirt on the bottom?

No, just fake Kenny Rogers Heads. All the way down.

At a trash 'n' treasure market,

in an average town,

an old radio

encased in bakelite.

 

Plugged in and

waiting for the valves to warm

I took to the dial with a frothing sense of urgency,

twisting past horse races and rock and roll,

past right-wing commentary,

            searching for the frequency of God,

long lost in digital audio,

            sure to be found

in the silver soldered

magic of a romanticised time.

 

            And there

at the end

of the amplitude modulated band,

                        megahertz away from any generic noise,

            a perfect silence.

for Leo Cullen who said: ‘Once Celtic tiger Ireland; now no teeth!'

 

In a doorway from the rain, on Blue Mouse Street,

he was shouting ‘Miracles! More miracles to come!'

The old beggar with the battered suitcase said,

‘Yes, I am sure there will be one for you.'

So I walked over, closer to his sign, which said:

Miracles For Sale! Compact and Portable!

 

He spoke conspiratorially when he saw my coins.

‘Come closer,' he said. ‘To me, you look a little

worried, as if lacking air, or joie de vivre,

but are lucky anyway. Because I see my suitcase

is going to open for you, and believe that a miracle

might well come out of my suitcase. And I look forward

to knowing how this suitcase miracle will manifest

itself, as I am quite certain now that it will!

Now listen,' he said, ‘and don't miss out.'

 

He took a plastic comb, held it to his mouth

and hummed and wheezed dreadfully through it.

‘That tune is called “Our Happiness”,' he said.

It made all the sparrows shake up from the trees.

And made small children run and cry, and the rain fall much harder.

He smiled, twirled and did a little hop and broken dance.

 

‘I love my life,' he said. ‘I love selling hope and miracles out here

in the rain, to all the passers-by on Blue Mouse Street.

Look,' he said, ‘I have a pocket full of holes. These are my “loopholes”,

and I pay no tax.' And he pulled his pockets inside out, and showed me.

 

‘I had a pocket full of hope once, but hope or fine illusions,

or any sort of negotiable miracle, all being invisible,

weigh less than a suitcase I carry for a rainy day like this one,

always hoping for a miracle to manifest, for my paying public.

Look!' And I imagined I saw us both standing there,

just then, and something was moving. ‘Yes, I believe

it is already starting to manifest, or snap open,'

 

he said. And the lid swung up and, inside the case,

I saw an old beggar open a suitcase. And inside that

was a smaller case, and us standing there, leaning

over a case that had just popped open, and so on …

but when I turned, he was gone, and so was the suitcase.

Only a muddy puddle where he had stood, but I could still

hear his tune, ‘Our Happiness', wheezing faintly through the rain.