The Best Australian Poems 2011 (10 page)

Began my search in middle-age: for the drunk with florid face gazing

from a grainy photo. First your gravesite, words wearing

away from the slippery stone both smooth and blanched. Website

 

offering wartime records touted the existence of medals

that would never be recovered. Verified you married in London

and brought home the bride. During the war you were court-martialled

 

for insubordination, often arrested on premises out of bounds.

But gambling dens or brothels? I don't know which. My mother supplied

some snippets: knowledge barely covering thirty minutes

 

– let alone those thirty mislaid years. Your brick-making trade demolished

by the Depression, you chased jobs you could seldom grasp, scampered

from house to house before landlords clobbered you for their rent.

 

Your only sport, the Australian Crawl through an ocean of booze, cascading

down the bars of Adelaide's public houses. Loss of an eye laying pipes provided

compensation, and furniture finally arrived for the family. Furniture

 

my mother had only seen on the cinema screen. Your wife at forty died lonely

and homesick in this foreign land. Ironically, from a weakened heart

– though most conceded it had really been broken. Disintegration

 

of immediate family followed, then the dalliance with a sodden neighbour.

And I was puzzled by your urgent quest for a life in the west, only to return

and die painfully, a few months later. I questioned and researched

 

but found no account of this time: where you went, what you did. And the one

who might have remembered has now joined you on the other side. Rumours filtered

down your new wife was killed by a car after visiting your grave. But she left

 

no death certificate, nor paper trail I could follow. It's as if she vanished

with the remainder of your whisky-stained notes, and drowned herself

in a billabong of booze in some obscure corner of your tarnished empire.

It is late at night when the Primitives emerge.

They withdraw their cash and go marketing abroad.

Strung with small hard parcels Malice rushes in.

She joins Obsession, Hate, Revenge.

They fuss about dressed in puce, red, yellow.

They stay their hand and while they prevaricate

Doubt sidles by without a word.

Panic takes off and hails an outbound bus.

Anxiety tries it on for size but rarely buys –

The price is never right and she can't negotiate.

Fear's on a bargain hunt but stuffs the whole deal up.

They will not seize the hour –

Uncanny, unlucky bedfellows.

(When asked if there was an example who had inspired her as Dietrich Bonhoeffer inspired Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard replied ‘Nye Bevan')

 

Aneurin Bevan woke up in flat Bathurst, to the drone

of Julia Gillard's ‘Ben Chifley, Light on the Hill'

speech as she condescended that Chifley

always regretted his lack of ‘a great education'.

Bevan had left school at thirteen, self-taught proudly

like Chifley. He wondered if Gillard ever knew

the power of freely chosen knowledge. When young,

he'd detested that chainstore quality he called

‘Everything in its place and nothing above

sixpence.' She liked ‘universality of education', her faith

in uniforms startling to a man who thought

socialism meant avoiding them, her stress

on educational achievements hollowly passim

insisting one acknowledge all her own. He thought

of Chifley and Evatt roasting baked potatoes

on a Murray houseboat, each free of envy

of the other's erudition. Then his irritation

became pity when he pictured Gillard

Welshly stiff in a little uniform, Welsh-mam-bossy

like his own mother, or nervously flirty, that old anxiety

of women for respect in crisis leaping

at their throats like blazer emblems,

unable to orate as he had: to think swiftly

on the spot, as his hand pressed on his heart.

Over the fence my newest neighbour greets me

swathed in her pet python (green and gold:

a good two metres). Never in a million years

could I pick up a thing like that. I've always had

an absolute horror of snakes of any kind.

Go on, she says, he'll let you stroke him.

Her hair twines down in ringlets, dark and sinuous.

I stroke him. He feels like a rather expensive handbag.

The snake lady's arms are silken and not like a handbag at all.

You were too good to cry much over me.

And now I let you go. Signed, The Dwarf.

                     —JOHN ASHBERY

I'm presuming, I know (just as winter will

unite enemies in spring, betray soporific words

left a tiny bit unhingd &, all gilt, such paroxetine

somnolence weakly ornamented – I thought

error might better pass enclosd, your coercion

somewhat sluiced by a subigated rose, an ouevre's

brocaded recitations, garlands left dishevelled

in the fog; my foliate despair (a locket) shows

(ingenious as mind-control ordaind by queer cherubs)

a Sun King smiling radiant while drawing

unself-conscious blancs from her morphine powderd

throne, an asthenic coterie (kept glad of work!)

laying about the cruel enclosure with studied

cartouchés, eyelids clasping inlaid silver birds.

 

So, the reason why I right up Verse, ills aside,

and carry charmd totes inside this bird of paradox,

informants gushing tedious and jocund, is, honey,

instrumental – the republic, enamelld & reductive,

its interiors' consigned affiliations, slops of law

and capital's bulbous, cordial seductions

grant lip service to this beguiling inheritance

(materialist, undetermin'd, in arrears) common sense

depositary and melamine;
Wallpaper
faces

unletterd & besmirchd by mismated possibility

drift across the onerous couch, a city wakes bedazzld

by the birth of a gildd, stirrupd fricatrice.

The reason for this mise en scène is, you know

'cause we live like worms) & think to like it.

As the tractor-exhaust


vistas of desert sky


resume the south ahead


the farmer and his family


are moving to the city

 

in debt and crusted cloth


at the river's speed


close but not together


going and reappearing


under the raft of noon

 

moving to the city

If only I spoke Mandarin

like a peasant, I'd say to the waiter

who compliments my crap Hanzi

copy of the restaurant name, ‘I could do better

if only I had prepared'

(great deathbed confessions: if only …).

I'd take my time,

learning how to speak like a child

and not pretend. Great translations

take gall and humility in equal measure.

I feel like putting up my hand

and asking for an extension

or another serving of the eggplant dish.

Meanwhile, Laurie is hacking into Les again;

downstairs, a banshee scream

of a little emperor thwarted.

‘It's death,' my aunt says, ‘and he's

reading your poems.'

Frank Sinatra sings ‘unforgettable' 

A raven, half a grove of poplars after wake

one receives news that one is gone

morse calls, toll calls and black

I stand on the ground of the displaced, scything the tufts

dawn bells – mathematical series of grey, and shades

after deaths.

Old People's House washed over with chinawhite fineness

art deco lines and the never-never-mind

a fire, left overnight, burnt to ground, wisps

cataract sky hanging low with a few decoys

one that was my father's ghost

on the mindsets of the villagers, his kin.

Of calligraphy, a word wrested

itself out of the mace of a young monk

wrote itself a wing and pressed hard a final dot

on the floor of the freshly dug grave, soft as flesh –

goodness returns to goodness – lush waves of wild grass rolling.

Under faded clouds, grains of my childhood

now I enter a Greek Orthodox house of worship in Kingston

swim in the rising tongues

of islands and archipelagos and the upturned seas

bathed in a hologram, sun washing over years and feet

held in caring hands, then

cut, roped, shifted, hanged up, nailed, in, out, under, over

dirt – warm, ever so, breathing

Down there by the fence is where everybody goes

to have sex.              Back to first nothingness,

a soapbox shouting, its own goalkeep,

scores, falling into conception: to posit

 

the use of fire as a universal right … a different

coat of arms for each insect.

But how combine

individual responsibility with a sense

 

of community, as the tone, fine-tuned, combines

brightness and power? See, this

is just the discussion we've been needing

to have, like, do we believe in love?              & if God is love,

 

             •       maybe we should be worshipping him?

             •       & if so, in what way precisely?

                     ←

                     ←

                     ←

                     ←

Turning it over

it's no coincidence

that the famous Tom Roberts painting

Holiday sketch at Coogee, 1888

preserved here in postcard form

is also the same view of the very fence post

where Christ's mother appeared to the people of Coogee

on those heated, sunstruck afternoons.

 

In the painting no one on the beach is nude.

People stroll the shore under parasols.

Cliffs in the distance, minus bathing baths.

Impressionism captures haze so well.

No shark has vomited up a tattooed arm in the aquarium.

No distant world wars. Not even a ravenous gull.

No cynical fence post, either, to deflect

the sunbright glare of Coogee's vision splendid.

 

It is as if the figure that might be Our Lady (dressed

in black) is picnicking,

surveying distant figures across the hot sand.

The sky beautiful as a bruise,

the waves petrified tulle frozen in paint.

 

Yet motion is what's wanted

as Our Lady of Coogee finally stands up,

black as pitch,

brushes crumbs from her holy shroud

amidst the fish and chip wrappings,

the apparition's vandalised fence post,

and opens her arms in wonder

at the miracle of real estate.

kicking in windows like old tvs

lasso some hose to scatter stray

hosts of morning tv, the kind

who're evangelical about anything

 

the day began with the question

of how to fold the labour

– simultaneous declaration

              of necessary breeze –

 

suburban magnolia puts on a show

‘on you frills lose their cuteness'

 

our street lacks verticality

              thus becomes a drive by

 

optimistic housetags

e.g. call it

FLORIDA

              & the cubist palm trees

                     will grow in Moonee Ponds

 

living close to the tracks

just to know things are going

(or that you can get going)

 

these things that are the same as

looking at your own handwriting

 

go upstairs to practice  baton twirls,

a double-hander flag routine

              & other choreographed delights

 

radio waves stirring the pond

where ducks collect surface dross

switching easily between

              air & gelatinous water

 

with an eye to the cinematic

a swan lands gracelessly

              spraying mud, bits of weed

                     but making me think of a version of Zeus

              as rendered by Rubens

                     (all white feathers pressed

                            indecently on creamy thighs)

 

poor Leda not yet

                     hip to the ruse