or a huge library reverberating messages between lines of shelves?
You fear asking the simplest question
because the answer is always the same,
and the voice that returns it is the familiar dominating one –
your teacher, your master, robbing you of all will,
keeping you as a servant.
The desire to subvert yourself, to speak
in the voice of another, to knock a chaos
into this order of illusions. And when they pass over you,
these shadows distinct as faces piercing the surface of water,
what do they drag in their wake? The presidential candidate’s
dream-speech delivered in bubbles of his own blood.
The desire to destroy. A selection of words
to mask your jealousy, every tentative emotion concealed.
Your arrogance the revolver in its holster.
Because there is no longer any guilty internal world,
your private thoughts lead you to a plain
where huge figures stand frozen, towers and monuments
shuttling messages into the air, light patterns
and gaudy over-obvious symbols.
There are no more images for you to touch,
only these hard prints on the eye
mistaking jungle-foliage for military uniforms.
Extinction breathes its gentle colours,
pastels of tensions released. Falling softly into a chair
you believe you are outside everything,
a light tune disappearing. At last
you become leader, compelled to speak.
But there is danger, for what have you left to confess
except constructions? The high chair, the fabricated podium,
disgust you like some story spilled at gunpoint.
You take the woman into your arms, but dark smoke
has entered your bones, and there is no remedy
but the need to continue travelling among these tortured bodies,
these trees, these flayed mountains.
You wanted to capture precision,
the insides of things, but each new word
dazzles you, is a prism of caught light,
and you are frozen in captivation.
Each second snaps like a forced door.
You have been absent from the city too long,
concealed in an ambush of riddles,
and now you are scarcely recognisable.
The clear strategies inhaled at high altitudes,
formed from clear air, are swept clean away
by your embarrassing forgetfulness.
What was the use of all the lost time
learning that you could no longer lie?
Perhaps you were only parroting
the words of a saviour, practical solutions
that carry across the seaboard
like the sound of distant gunfire.
The demagogue’s beard cultivated in a garbage dump.
The priest’s sash sweeping across polished boards
as prickly infection wipes a baby’s mouth.
You are too malleable. A servant’s hysteria
scours you with painful laughter. Lawless
your shining objects shake from the walls.
Make neat piles of them. Scrub your empty face
until it burns. Make up a story.
The Dark Sisters
Robert Gray
for Stephen Edgar and Judy Beveridge
If it’s possible
as you travel
you should turn north and see Glencoe.
Some will say no—
keep a sense
of the Renaissance
about you. I know that you are not among those
who choose
to ignore what history’s shown us to be,
beneath a grandeur or grandiosity.
Be sure to go
late of a long afternoon (although
it is dark there in the blaze of noon).
The tourist buses have moved on
at that hour
when you arrive by bike or car;
and as you stand alone
in the ravine
you will experience the Sublime,
which Burke defined
as Nature that is ‘terrible’
(but which enlivens, if the watcher is safe for a while).
Hard to tell
the lie of the land—
those three long ridges incline, each to its mound
that is a misshapen, bloated globule
in a swamp, or on murky sump-oil.
The hills are stolid,
a cold lava, stone-naked,
or they can appear
to rear
at the angle
of a bull seal
when it plunges ashore.
There is a constantly seeping water
that is silver,
striated on each billowing slope.
What I want to evoke
is the summer—how it seems to have let fall a sodden cloak.
In winter, there hove
closely above,
from out of murk,
the Flying Dutchman’s hulk,
but with April, a stream is gibbering its way
in the floor of the valley.
Such a place
was like a man who had a ‘gallows face’,
of whom they’d have said
he invited
his involvement in tragedy.
The light at the time I say
is on the loins
of these stocky mountains,
like the sword blade they would clean
beneath the arm, on their linen,
but not on plaid,
and carried lowered.
The MacDonald clan was hospitable
to a rabble
in the pit of winter,
1692, as required by honour.
At their hamlet of whitewashed stone,
through the vale, they’d taken in
each steaming cow and pig and hen,
and the 129
mercenaries, who outnumbered them,
come to proclaim
William as king, imposed upon
Scotland, too. The chieftain
had been loath
or tardy about the oath,
who lay down
with arthritis and chilblain,
and now must pay a fine.
The interlopers sprawled
along the bench, in each household,
watching the children fed from a spoon,
and drank the whisky, with its fume
like the mist above a loch.
What a piece of work
is man—how devious
in the spontaneous
refined high level
of his devilishness.
Not one of the troop betrayed its intent;
and nothing was meant
for the hosts, on turning up
a card. They noticed only the hearth fire leap
in a drowsy pupil.
Ten days passed (an ordeal
of itself) before the signal
at dawn—a bonfire, in which the families woke
and saw how murder broke
out of those faces. A sword went in
the servant girl, where the soldiers had lain.
The stranded or fleeing were chopped down—
they shed a limb
as they tried to climb
on the salt-packed snow,
or saw a sword-tip throw
about them the watery
loop of blood. Blood flew away
like the flight of the galaxy.
Some were allowed
to escape, who’d have to wade
thigh-deep, with just a shawl—
like broken crows they crawled, their call
flapping. When you come into this region
you won’t need to summon
what you should feel—
our old disquiet, of betrayal,
will overwhelm. I have thought
on what is meant
by the dark sisters, those immemorial
mourners, in their veil.
Whatever level
of existence, however deep we plumb,
things come
in packages, are separate;
they co-operate, or assert
themselves, to annihilate
what constricts them. All things, we find, will fluctuate
on this scale. It is said the truth can set us free,
if only of the illusory.—
When you are there, you might feel
that evil is in the molecule.
the dead are with us
Kit Kelen
the dead stand by us
peer over our shoulders
into the coffin
for this long last glimpse
no glass
just this final mirror
there’s always
one hair out of place
and poignant that
they cannot touch
you read it here
Kit Kelen
the dead speak
in the eternal present
that’s how it is when
your date’s set in stone
on the far side
of a hyphen
The Ear Especially
Corey Wakeling
You don’t need eschatology to see the finitude
in all this. Cantilever arm of all sweetness,
pinions of every description
in the sinew of its reaching out. And towards
what? The globe is fine corpulence, the flesh
of the ear especially,
vigour of sports car on wet May bitumen slighting
the bone catacomb smart. Paris, hello. Where
have you hidden my brother, and Now,
my brother’s brotherhood. There is a Southern Californian
song about all of this that eschatology
cannot penetrate. So stop, sweet claw of new day,
digits clammy.
The clay pits, to gasp with hand on back of head,
to be lulled to sleep like the puppet infanta,
side with brother clover and fatten wanton,
lope the lambent disguise if but only in the moment
of finitude. Need not finitude to see the sweetness
in all of this that made eschatologies
unrenewable, when instead,
and we do know this, the fossil only comes twice,
as in: all time under, the all time no time above.
That grasp, darling hand, park your car, knowing restlessness
and velocity in the woken, in the face.
The God of Bone and Antler
Daniel East
What passes here for air is dry.
Four bare rooms and four doorless frames
sixteen unwindowed walls of caulked pine
and countless things with claws that scrabble
in the dry above.
If it lives
it lives like a shadow, preceding and anterior
to the light, tethered at the edge of vision.
Your feet below are naked.
As you creep across the boards
there is a scraping, a thunk
a hiss, clock, hiss and clock
of limbs as they strike ancient wood.
An antiphony of bones, a twitching cow skull
in a nest of horns.
It has no songs, it is kin to stone and ferryman to beasts;
language makes no purchase
and keeps no token or effect.
You wonder as you go within
elbows held over your breast
if it thinks like a draught horse working a bit –
teeth wearing flat on steel.
If it lives, it is behind,
cracked hoof seeking the shelving of your heart.
The inevitable beauty of the viewer when faced with the partitionist tactics of the situationist lover
Fiona Hile
You and your beauty ask questions of the viewer such as
What is Form and Why is this Happening?
The viewer not wanting to exceed the beauty
of the inoperable sees she must match its unstoppable
theory to overdue notions of the apartheid of literature.
Nothing to see in the spectacle of your lips
but the insistence of the letter in the mire of
situationist abandonment. Keep telling yourself that
the poem is a container for the formless horror of your
eyes as emotion skinning you to the scrutiny of the
automaton as inadequate representation of the poem as a
of the never stops not being written
The Life Inside
Judith Rodriguez
A little house, a little house.
Heard from the yard:
fresh voices at the door.
A little house.
A little house.
The shelves that fill,
and cups along the board.
A little house.
Two chairs pushed close,
the crossword page filled out.
A little house.
Heard from the bed:
the hot wind all night long.
A little house.
The photos stare.
The phone shrills once and stops.
A little house.
Heard by no ear
the messages repeat.
A little house.
The orchard
Hu Xian (translated by Ouyang Yu)
Happiness came with such a vengeance ...
In the darkness, an apple
Had left its branch
‘Last night, whose heart thumped violently?’
Someone fainted in the thunderous rain
A fine shadow
Swept the land before it died
– the orchard in the summer, shining light spots
Were following me all the time
Under a tree, I listened, my ears pricked
Within the clean flesh of the fruit, a creek rushed scouring
I sensed that happiness was slow
And that it required me to lighten my steps
Branches extending themselves, the green waves of the orchard were quietly rolling
It was not till then that the old orchard peasant told me
That he sometimes would dream of his own death, like an apple falling
The owl painting
Thomas Shapcott
The owl looks angry. It also, I think, looks very frightened.
The artist has been scrupulous. The beak
And claws are not to be trifled with.
The setting is specific – a Queensland bathroom
Already old-fashioned if not dilapidated
So that the bird, perched on the rim, looks out of place.
That is the idea: discomfort and confusion
Enough for anger to rise in anyone. It does.
So that the painting expresses complete resentment.
Why my former wife bought it is completely obvious
and it has nothing to do with value – at least, not as money.
It has something to do with isolation, however.
And, for the first time, I think of that bathroom
As place of confinement, a tortuous space.
Wings are not given to us, but claws are.
There is nothing more terrible than confinement
Or more endangering and threatening than fear.
We might not have beaks but we have other weapons.
The Roadside Bramble
Peter Minter
Walking late by a roadside bramble
Hoops of brittle thorn, a caul of dead grass, quiet rust
Frost-burnt une feuille serrate
Motes fall and swirl as brassy notes and cobwebs
Tangle straw stems in mossy dirt, the gravel wash
A stripped page of newspaper rotting, crushed
Polyethylene terephthalate
Half-full of piss or rain water, the sign of a dog
Chalk eroded in the furrow of a wheel
Gone a little wide on the corner, or a near miss
Now overgrown in parochial paspalum, afternoon light
Cold and real, bees somewhere in the shadows
A thought of honey in the thicket
The grey common behind a wire fence half down in the damp
Bruise hung on the smoke
Of a sundog burnt in hazy sky, translucent
Sleep stuck in the cavernous dawn of a bramble there by the roadside
Where I hurry into the emaciated past
Where dry straw recedes speechless into the middle distance
A skein of mist settling over a paddock
Air still, damp, muddy in my nose as the scent of blood
Steel cold hockey bone blue, knee high
Twigs and the hair on my skin lift in the golden aperture
Of the sky’s milk crystal
Fanned behind a brittle stand of eight grey poplars