The Best Australian Poems 2011 (8 page)

Now the last line won't irrigate

Dog-jawed ministers pant on camera

wan half-rhymes

filling dry channels

like droplets shaken from a child's flask

In tour-of-duty heat

a neat tie

may be a metaphor for resolution

If only the lack of a definite article

before ‘country'

didn't make them stammer so

Meanwhile the press's compound eye

hallucinates a Chinese-invested coal station

mid-stream, when mid-stream is simply an illusion

of a liquid past

something the doctor asks you to save

in a bottle

 

Some poets have forgotten

to ask what it is

they are burning in the grate

On a cold night I am one of them

– the coal-fired heart

the pathetic revenge of the powerless

bringing paper fuel to the table

to burn and burn again

Is this all that's left?

The restive recitals

the pained nostalgia for trees and rivers

that comes
after
trees and rivers?

Contemplating this dun catalogue

makes me tired

as if I had walked

the salt bed of the Murray from north to south

dragging my plastic pen

through the silt like an ape

 

There is nothing I want to save in a bottle

i.m. Peter Porter

 

You were the high-wire act,

me in my clown-suit on the slack-rope below.

We didn't appear much together in fact:

you in your eminence much the more famous show.

Still in the long times we met

we shared all our knowledge and taste,

talking around and around

about politics, art and music without haste

and would have done so for many a year

had you not fallen to the ground.

Send in the clowns?

                     Don't bother, I'm here.

I remember part of my bootleg

something boiling over

but someone still had

an eye on the game

the serene, small television

I was original mono

someone was singing

like milk happening

psychedelic ball pock bang

the dogs were touching

things with changelings

charged with damages

emptying the fire extinguisher

into the ash tray

I'm taking notes

then must sing them

expedition to a place

where I can think

the end being the apex

hypnotic sound from

someone's hands on

the vox turned low

I remember being

pulled down a road

I had to stop miming

my watch though

time keeps going

begins to end static

wires tubes and batteries

only present crackles

within the harmonium

and sublime's shaky hands

I was original bootleg

vox hypno and charge

(i) Warwick, NY

A point has no dimension: the bird in flight across the field

describes a line, but does not exist anywhere on that line.

 

The cardinal is a red point, the jay a blue.

Here, everything is contained in the immensity of the present.

 

When we leave for the airport, in anticipation,

with regret, we enter time.

 

(ii) Talbot, Vic

Atop our ancient volcano, we are cleansed by the heat

of January – pasteurised, as a poet put it.

 

The agisted sheep gnaw the ground, but the grass is eternal.

We name the mountains around us, ignorant of their true names.

 

The windmills to the southwest, the new horizon, have no names.

We do not want to leave here, which is the point of coming.

 

(iii) Kawhia, Waikato

In the afternoon, Carmen sits and drums on a log:

all the cows gather to watch her. We focus on this one moment.

 

What are the pearls on your necklace, the figures on your torq?

At the heart of travel is blood and family ties.

 

How much are you willing to pay for what you want?

In leaving, what we leave behind we hope is a gift, not a sorrow.

 

(iv) New York

‘Get out of
my
terminal!' shouts the cop in JFK.

It's all street theatre here, and underneath, on the E line.

 

‘What's the point of travel?' we ask. Three lines to three places,

only to do it all over again.

 

The red-tail hawk, with its speckled breast, makes one crashing dive

to carry off the sparrow on the railing.

 

How pointless can it be, when our lives describe a triangle,

while we find ourselves at home at the centre of ourselves?

A jingle woke and gee-up knew.

Who prime-numbered the village –

routed the countryside? a wolf sack

filled with of courses, perhapses, and maybe.

Power feeds the organ's gaskets, postures,

lizard, plasma, shouting blue – schism –

people believe and behave. Where country

and town woe begone, the cars breathe fire.

There was relax and friend-hut, warmth

to the chilled the shelterer provided;

a gentle hand opened a door to the future

and the village? A nymph went wild – a guest's

wheels – then the bull exploded, the creek

flooded, the shower screen was brilliantine.

I'll ask you to assemble here

next to the step where so many feet have stood shifting,

waiting for a welcome,

that they have worn a cupped impression in the brick.

 

There are no headphones or podcast,

no virtual tour

nothing is animatronic

there are not even signs;

in this museum objects must be noticed

in order to be named.

 

Let me invite you

to put your sceptical fingers here, into a wall

cracked open like a seam;

in that arid subsiding spot,

with its bite of jagged mortar exposed,

feel the evidence, deliberate as a glacier,

of movement

of the power of slow ruin.

 

And in the shed on this salvaged beam

taken from the old factory, you can read

the faded names of workers from half a century ago

still scrawled, provisionally, in pencil:

Joe Wally Gavin Terry

 

This four-inch nail banged in beside them to hold invoices

that they always meant to replace with a decent hook or clip;

see how it's still holding fast

long after they have gone,

see how they were wrong

about what was temporary.

 

These are the exhibits worth naming,

the triumph of the nondescript

the steady rise and rise

of the inevitable.

 

Seeing them here, barely visible, demanding nothing,

might remind you of your own belongings –

the last things you expected to have bundled under your arm;

the shirts washed colourless, and the unfinished books

that you know would have done you good,

one hand clutching the dented pie dish, scored

like an endless unsolved equation

the hat with its forgotten tidemarks of sweat

 

everything it's too late to grieve for

that you thought you had discarded

everything you used, unthinkingly,

until it was burnished

into invisibility

these remnants, adrift from their stories,

will end up here too.

 

Whatever lies we tell ourselves,

these are the things that will outlive us:

that brick

will see us out;

that forgotten nail

driven in with four heedless, glinting hammer blows

back in 1957

will remain immoveable in that piece of hardwood

when you and I are dust.

 

And the ghosts who've stopped in this doorway

and rested one hand tiredly against the wall

to take off their boots before coming inside –

just here, their fingers grazing this worn unsanctified spot –

their voices are as distant

as impossible

as sirens.

 

Well, this is where I leave you

to make your way through the rooms,

threading back and back into the hushed corners,

your lips moving with recognition,

until there are no rooms

until you are standing empty-handed

in the sunlight.

‘The sun hit me in the face like a bully,'

wrote Laurie Lee in
Cider with Rosie
.

Our teacher, Mr Foster, said that was ‘glib'.

 

Unfortunately, we didn't know what ‘glib' was,

so Mr Foster had to explain,

and the more substantial point was pushed

 

to the back of the mind. Until today,

when, a quarter of a century on,

and resident in a foreign land,

 

I decided that he was probably right,

before dozing off with a drink in my hand,

the late sun blackening both my eyes.

What's history? Is history

when Abraham Lincoln stands, thinking,

hand on the back of a chair?

 

Is history those breathless bludgeonings, the sporadic wild words

from the mist at Culloden?

 

What is history? Is it when everyone believes the handshakes

in spite of all the epaulettes?

 

Is it history when Picasso and his guests

see six pudgy German tourists

lying in a nude row on the cobbled beach

not far from Antibes, scrotums lined up

like apologetic mice,

like subdued

sausages?

 

The guests laugh

at these incongruous, privileged bodies –

but the painter frowns, remembering

carolling children's voices, footsteps of unsuspecting lightness,

the edicted morning school assemblies,

the boots of Nazis misunderstanding

Paris stairs.

 

Is that history?

The Nazis loved their music. Is that history?

Is history the steaming biosphere, water

lashing empty lanes? Is history present tense?

 

That's what history does –

it bites us, then looks away.

People file into the room, find their seats,

fill up the air with chatter. The stage

is bare except for a leather couch

and a lamp on a chrome and bakelite stand.

It's meant to be an old factory converted

to an apartment – exposed pipes, a ceiling

fit for a cathedral, polished oak floorboards.

A man dressed in black makes an announcement

about mobile phones. The lights go down.

I don't know what I'm doing here,

I just know that this is theatre, my son an actor.

 

I hear his voice before I see him. It's as loud

as the wind swatting at a loose sheet of corrugated iron

on the chook shed. When he comes on stage

he swears five times in the first minute,

all in the presence of a lady. I've a good mind

to go down and slap him about the face,

except that I'm sitting right in the middle of the row

and it wouldn't be easy getting past all those knees.

Then I remember that he's pretending

to be someone else, that this is his job now.

Soon everyone is laughing – they're smiling

and nodding and taking in every move my son makes.

 

I've never been to a play before. It's not

boilermaking, not the flying sparks from an arc welder,

not the precision required for a submarine hull,

nor the relief of taking off your helmet,

gloves and apron and enjoying the coolness

of a harbour breeze as you eat your lunch,

but it is, I guess, a different kind of trade.

I watch more and it all happens before my eyes

and I can see that he loves this lady,

everyone can see it and I want to say, ‘Son,

what are you afraid of?' I want to reach out

and lift him up as I did when he was two

years old, riding a supermarket trolley

and screaming as if he'd just discovered

the power of his lungs. But I can't touch him now

or even talk to him and I have this feeling

that it will turn out badly, like the week you have

the numbers in Lotto, but forget to buy the ticket.

 

The stage is dark again and he's not swearing now

and the lady's really pleased to see him

and she burns this scrap of paper and it flares up,

bright and yellow in the darkness

and the flame flickers across his forehead

and I glimpse in my son's face the unmistakable

features of my father who is ten years dead.

Although the three of us won't ever meet again,

I'm sure Dad would have loved this – a story

that takes a whole evening in the telling

and a small fire that leaps and glows

and transfixes us, for as long as it burns.