The Best Australian Poems 2011 (5 page)

Master of Stomachs, our powers have greyed

absorbed for congruent, apparent eternity.

Hustle and bustle, gristle and grit are no match

for something you cannot pass first.

 

Lord of Starlessness, lumbering slob!

Skyscraper, babel of crockery, serves you.

Windlicked streets trawl for dross.

 

Night Sky Swallower, infinite oesophagus,

holes in your mouths become mouths in our holes.

How has the meal of our brains not killed you?

Same goes, O Indigestible Gape.

mais qui voit la fleur, dont voir le soleil

 

Dawn, clock-face of the heavens, becomes

momentous with fulfilment, birds

with the eccentricity of minutes, wake,

launch themselves into the unfolding

air of time, each with its own beady

reading of history: insects too

stir into action and that same air

in its bland magnanimity, takes them in

as the Cash Converters down below

open their everlasting doors to the latest

needy – the world at large is ready for

business
: early ants carting home

the injured and the accidentally dead,

young magpies squawking for

another handout and the heart

punching the body's bundy only yet

half-awake to what may come

down the chute to it before

the next night signs it off …

The image lit against the eye's dark lid

is often clearer than the light of day.

Sometimes I see the view amended:

 

the missing key, the winter tree inverted

as a photo negative, a blazing x-ray

of the image lit against the eye's dark lid.

 

In conversation, details that were hid

may come to light in such or such a way

(for better or for worse)  the view's amended.

 

It shows what's dimmed and what's illuminated,

the shifting chiaroscuro. Who's to say

the image lit against the eye's dark lid

 

is closer/further from the one intended?

And what directs the cutting room, the replay

– where sometimes the truth can be amended?

 

With luck, by second chance I'm visited

by definition in a field of grey;

in the image lit against the eye's dark lid,

I sometimes see the view amended.

When a perfect purple iris

pokes out its lovely tongue

at the tulip's scarlet lips;

and the pose of a half-open rose

near a deep-throated daffodil

provokes a pansy's frown,

but the daisy winks a dark eye;

then the watching calla lily

exposes an urgent stamen.

Passing bees all raise their eyes

though none of it comes as a huge surprise.

You know the way a snatch of song lodges in your brain and won't be shifted no matter how you try to trick it out the door?

 

Well, this morning ‘Amazing Grace' has come to stay, just the tune and those two words; the bits about ‘no sweeter sound' and ‘save a wretch like me'

 

disregarded somewhere else. Which is not so strange as I don't believe in ‘lost' and ‘saved' but I do know forms of grace exist

 

and are amazing. I think of a dancer's grace as she glides into the air, or the diver's equal grace gliding towards the sea: the body in defiance of its limitations,

 

going through, beyond. Graceful, gracious, gracile, words that multiply and spread like flowering vine. Grace notes of unbelief that still restore the faith.

 

I'd like to be standing by the laundry door looking at snow piled high in the backyard and stretching away to distant hills, all deep silence and soft light,

 

indistinctions that are pliable and hint at more and more concealment. Here, today, each leaf and branch is clear, and even shadows are

 

unsentimentally direct. Surface is baked surface and heat haze won't bear comparison with mist, won't let me think transcendence.

 

The following is true. The water in the bay is pristine, amazing shades of green, a random morse of light, the sea flushing between rocks with the gentle pop and splash

 

that avoids monotony. But in the channel, among the leaves and weed and scraps of paper, two dead seabirds – black and bloated – bob in the push and pull,

 

their wings flared and fixed in mimicry of flight, their feet flexed as though they were about to land.

 

And now I'm stuck in the feedback loop: adrift in sun, snow, amazing grace, dead birds. The binary brain looking for a way out or in between,

 

a way to celebrate without appearing selfish or simple-minded, without me at the centre pulling strings or getting out the bubble wrap,

 

without an image of the imageless, or an image of the world devoid of people to make the whole thing work, the dream,

 

uncalled for, undeserved, of the present expanding as if there is no future or the future is this presence, that leafless tree against the sky,

 

the glittering humpbacked sea, the thousand flickering things the mind lights on and tries to hold.

Cento for Pam Brown

 

If I could take a flight from zero

to infinity, get lost nearby

that
Eloquence
– now I am free!

Atomic rocks

form like hills & dunes,

like grass. I do a lot of thinking.

Sky goes rococo as the nearest dream

is led away. We behave badly

in dangerous clothes & laugh for days.

I want to remember this chaos,

song of one breath in A.

Phantoms on the home stretch

call my name. Bird  magician

sugar   concrete

a woman opening the heavy door.

There are no lyrics left

& another reality howls

as the new gets

newer. I stood exactly where

those piles of books carried me.

Over ruins of this comedy

I lie surrounded by beauty

until the Pleaides blink

like a sparkler in the HaHa Room.

who fly epic arcs, slipping through

atmospheres, past sleeping continents –

so good at bathing, too: cajoling brine

over wings with shivering leaps backwards

then a final shimmy ten feet above

as if to baptise their former selves.

Next, the charisma of flight – their bodies

such an ingenious fit with the world

as they side-swipe the wind, ride its back

to reconnoitre the river, make lightning-culls

from the hearts of sudden white flowers.

Later they stand, dumpy yet winsome

on mirror sand, facing out to sea:

their eyes calm, gleaming like homely stars.

She surrounded the wounded but courageous

love of her life with objects, and more objects

than you can imagine but which sometimes he

wanted to leave behind, and he'd pace the house

like a placid, intelligent but caged animal taking

this as his reality: the pictures on the wall, the

patterns on the carpet, the many figurines and

gaily patterned porcelain, joyously acquired

on outings together to exhibitions and galleries,

she also asked him to search for and research

whenever he felt any sickness coming on again,

relatives were persuaded to leave them objects

and paintings in their wills, adding even more

complexity to this, their private gallery, which I'd

dream about in terms of a gift shop and then

wonder when, finally, we would open the doors

to the public? but my mother kept on collecting,

she even studied Art to become a volunteer gallery

guide, never a word passing her lips about why,

and when I dared to say, near the end of her life,

that I often wondered whether there was anything

‘wrong' with Father, she turned and looked at me

in silence, with the sworn secrecy of the Resistance

Father took, along with ECT Amnesia, to his grave.

Whenever I start a narrative poem she says
God

God God
, so you can take that for granted: I'm

editing her responses. This is the yarn of, well,

you'll recognise it (and imagine her with her hands

over her ears as she does the washing up: with

her elbows I suppose). After my third there was

a swan and then a suckling pig. I'd find myself

hanging out clothes in my underwear – or my husband's –

and the neighbours drawing the blinds at each other,

saying, she's not really adjusting to Wahroonga

is she? They – inside my own house – have eaten

me a hole in the couch, and I'm doing the accounts

with one hand and killing a snake with another

while I get an armful of wood. But after a few wines

and a few accidental discounts ‘at' work, (I have

an online business) I'm ready for Joint Family

Suicide: one of our ‘TV games'.
God God God

adding rhythm. Then my eldest comes in with blood

on his face from fighting with some Pymble trash

and says we're out of water. So I gather up the

tribe: one or two boys, one or two girls, the swan

and the suckling pig, and we head towards the

Lindfield reservoir, each of us with the biggest

water vessel we can carry. Then there's a shift

in critique, she's saying
you can't
, meaning I can't,

tell a woman's story
. But I am telling it. Mariah

(named after the wind, not the singer), has crawled

into a crocodile, and I didn't even know they had

crocodiles on the North Shore, but I'm only a girl

from Nimmitabel with a horde of kids of one kind

or another walking the edge of the road, wine bottles

in hand playing sweet, sweet music with their little

breaths. The swan gets in after her, and I wouldn't

want to be a crocodile on the other end of a swan.

I think the swan left a torn Coke can in the croc

for good measure. And Mariah comes out all slimy

and beaming with some sorry overbred excuse

for a Wahroonga hound, saying, Mummy, look

I found a puppy! And I say, hooray, what are you

going to feed it on? But there's a crow eating a

possum as we turn the corner, and Mariah's got

her waddy so she shoos the crow on the head and

puts it in her dilly bag and sets the little socialite

with its faux diamond collar's kisser in the pre-

pecked possum.
Uh, animal cruelty? Examples

to children?
I hear over the lino vacuuming. Bush

rules, I say. It's starting to get dark, and as I'm

new to this builtup area (only having recently moved

here from Belconnen) it seems very strange and

eerie. The houses here truly have no season, no

blossom, and the lawns have no smell. I had a couple

of cones earlier and a slight feeling of paranoia

begins to resurface. But as anyone who thought

of it would say, you can't drink paranoia (let alone

have a bubble bath in it or boil spuds). So we head

on, but I'm glad I brought my shotgun. The kids

and co. are all wearing their scapulas, too. So when

the Devil rides up on a horse, I'm terrified but stand

my ground. Nice little herd of pigs you got, he

says, stroking the dead lamb in his lap. He broke

into my consciousness with that one I said to Trent

later. I'll give you a waterbag for the boy, he said,

not pointing at my oldest, but at Jess, my androgynous

third, and I said no deal. Give us a billy out of

the good of your heart, I said. And while I waited

on his reply I chanted Hail Mary, full of grace,

the Lord is with thee, and he said, Nema eartson

sitrom aroh ni te cnun. Which sounded like nothing

but I soon realised was the Ave Maria in backwards

Latin. And I said, in forwards Spanish, Dios te

salve, María, llena eres de gracia. And the Devil

replied Nema etrom artson alled aro'llen osseda

(in backwards Italian), so I said, grabbing the billy

by the handle as I did so, and mentally thanking

the Portuguese nun I'd studied with, Avé Maria,

cheia de graça, o Senhor é convosco. And he grabbed

the handle too with his bony hand like Voss come

out of the desert to steal my children, my honeybees,

muttering in his best better backwards French accent,

Nema trom erton ed erueh'l à te tnanetniam. I shot

half his head off then, yelling fit to rouse the Nazis

from their Master Chefs in Hell, Gegrüßet seist

du, Maria, voll der Gnade, der Herr ist mit dir!

I knew I was out of languages, and I could tell he

was ready with backwards Tagalog. Jess gave me

her/his saw and I cut off the Devil's fingers

and took the billy: it was a diabolical billy and

never emptied. So we threw our bottles into the

bushes and headed home, thinking that Trent would

probably be home from the bank by now. Steeds

of Satan though are faster than lightning, and we

got home an hour earlier than we'd left. So I decided

not to smoke the second time round. Gave Mariah

a pot to cook the crow in, and did some journalling.

It looked like we could make ourselves at home

in Wahroonga after all. I can hear exaggerated

yawning from the bedroom, so I'll leave the story

there, put the garbage out and the kettle on, and

go in to the love of my life. My witchetty's at half-

mast already. Bon voyage-nuit!