Pines melting in the middle distance
Dark green glass shards sliding into the earth
A path trodden flakes of rock
Through clumps and bristles of grass and wet-stemmed seed-heads
Dropping over bright plastic bits and rusting caps
Squashed with dirt into a bleak loam
A field scattered with the bones of my predecessors
Wandering aimlessly over turquoise hills, smoky dead trees
I find I’m outside the future, overgrown
Great walls of roots & earth crumbling sodden in the muddy weather
Wooden claws of hackberry gum
Knotted foetal in the grey wind, contrail chords in the sky
Lines unfurling between hard matter and blue
Blown above a jetliner’s silver precipice
Disappearing into the end of a broken branch
Time and space are orange as mud in gravel
Trees a-glint with a wild fire
Sparks flying across the horizon the singular grey abyss
Every bramble has been the same, I think
As they all rush from my past like black swans, snow geese
Drawn into the circle of gravel
A formation of birds dropping suddenly into mind
As I walk around, feathers widening
Angular as they land into the poverty of the world
The horizon always looking, then retreating from the present
And all it holds, the skeletal frame of a sparrow chick
Its absent eye resting on a quartz pebble
Left as a sign to the logic of inhuman death, clear, immensely old
A grain of cold stone, the indifferent raw tangle
In a bracken fern halo, the silent forehead of a sickle moon
Tacked strangely to a wooden light-pole
The sound of water tinkling and gurgling, treble & bass
A silver banner fluttering and wending
Through the poplars and brace of pines
Darkness somehow equal to its bright and random melody
Caught in the cold pomegranate at the road’s end
Crimson flesh held in a world of white foam
Mist correlates, transpires, solid shapes beneath the moon
& stars, hips and haws, love and hate
No matter how opaque and powerless I become
I still cry into the night as it springs burning into felony
Emptiness glowing through dry yellow stalks
No match for the whorl at the crown of your head
Telescoped to a galaxy, a whale from the old world bare
As a chunky key-ring nob lost in the mossy grit
Where I walk & look, no doubt within
Perhaps hell-bent as gravel paths spread from me chaotically
All the same, having wandered here before
And knowing how each will always yield its own
I fall away into the roadside ditch
Sticks and mud stuck in my hair, the back of my throat
Catching the gold sunset
Behind, of course, bitumen spread Bauhaus thin and black
A wall of glass windows over the road
A mercury pool shimmering in the wind
The whole reflected world shuddering.
The Slide
Jill Jones
Sometimes they put you in seas
or rivers without telling you.
The river is dark, let’s say
and trees are low over you.
In the branches are owls
making noises like a machine
breathing.
After you come away from this
you have a scar and a jar
where you swim.
It is chemical, archaeological
and violent.
So you wash it all away.
It’s too early for things to be
broken or twisted
but even when you run, you fall.
All your life, if you could fly
all your life slides from under you
and you do not have to swallow
water or hear it.
You do not have to but you must
as the clouds fall without telling you.
from The Vanity of Australian Wishes
Alan Wearne
8
One Saturday evening Forbes and I leave his monastic,
lino-paved North Carlton house, heading for Brunswick Street.
We know what to expect:
Bohemia as a free-market, tolerant-enough, rock’n‘roll
republic for the Kids in Black, though tonight
hosting the Templestowe hordes,
the Menai, MacGregor and Joondoolup hordes
who John observes, ‘Go for all this
with the same intensity they’d go for wowserism.’
Admirably correct of course, and I won’t forget it,
but does he feel as if some Leagues Club
propped by the four pillars of its demos ethos
Good beer, good tucker, good mates, good times
might somehow be wowser-free and purer?
I dare not ask him.
Meanwhile, one or two ks west
The Great Gangitano is doubtless shaking down,
or planning shaking down, or celebrating shaking down
the subjects of his lulu kingdom. Then later,
with Jason and whoever needs the thrill-enough,
find him in King Street, lots of heads in King Street,
some to get cracked, some to look away;
lots of tits too, sweet and getting sweeter;
and lots of space to be caught on camera just like that,
like that all-too-real-thing, a movie star, is meant to be.
What this man needs is a brother, to set his limits,
for if you must standover, please … with style?
Broadsheet, tabloid or talk, whatever gives a crew its name
they have to deserve their reputation and Alphonse
you just aren’t deserving it.
Is this what made them visit you
that mid-summer Friday night?
It might’ve been when the bro-talk started, it sure was where
and when it stopped: lots of shouting in a big house.
Know the it of You’re losing it?
Well you lose plenty but when the it occurs,
your mate Jason loses plenty more
and the Robert De Niro of Lygon Street
finishes as the Joe Pesci of Templestowe,
whacked from behind because he was a fucking lulu.
The following evening I visit John who leaves
for an hour, push-biking in the heat,
probably to Preston for his cough mixture
(whatever that mixture’s holding in reserve
spirits are resurrected, though little else could be).
All doors and windows of a stuffy house
opening onto a stuffy Melbourne,
we watched The Merchant of Venice,
a series of static tableaux perhaps, though
drenched in poetry, with John like some De La Salle brother
quizzing boys on certain passages, characters
and all its ambiguity.
I’ll speak to him once more,
we’ll talk about Bruce Dawe, how he writes ‘themes’,
how English teachers love their ‘themes’,
how because of ‘themes’ Bru
ce Dawe makes the syllabi,
how his books sell and how, if not rich
he’s far richer than we’re becoming,
though which one day could still be ours
like Shakespeare might be. Yes.
And then the wish-list ends.
And then the day they’re burying that other one
John dies.
The View from GOMA
Angela Gardner
I can see into the empty offices
and on the far bank, through archways,
a factory yard frames groves
of plastic crates stacked onto pallets,
where trucks jackknife
to reverse park.
It’s quiet here between shows. The river
side hotel advertises cable tv,
empty balconies (a single chair
and aircon units) level with the traffic.
Clouds are building. Through a break
XXXX.
Observe: a sign flashes, a man walks
across to the hostels on Roma.
Thunder is in the air, it’s time
-lapse, incremental, and no-one
lifts their heads, as cars exit
the bridge to approach the roundabout.
I address the park – soft-headed
with grasses, formal with bike paths,
where only water-pipes and stop-cocks
lie prone on the grass.
The ward is new
Geoff Page
A signature and so
I’m through two doors and in
this freshly opened smallish airport
terminal of light
which slants in through clerestories,
a view out to the mountains.
The whole thing’s done with courtyards,
a scattering of smokers,
thoughtful mostly, sometimes talking
softly to themselves.
Mainly it’s communal,
a wary sort of wit.
A Psychiatric Treatment Order
is what my friend has got:
medications, calibrations,
side effects to be withstood,
a restoration, mil by mil.
The rooms are pleasantly en suite,
a motel minus cars.
The staff are friendly, well intentioned,
gentle with their skills
and on the other side of glass.
The patients wave to catch their eye,
dance perhaps or shout a little.
The afternoon is turning drowsy.
The brain’s electro-chemical,
sparking its connections.
What are we but its tuning really?
In three weeks time, or maybe months,
his friends and he will reacquire
a tightrope-walker’s balance.
They’ll be a present to themselves.
It’s all approximate, they know:
the tentative nomenclatures,
the rescue wrought by measurement,
the let’s try this, the let’s try that.
The talking cure is later on
and soft around the edges,
the childhoods now too far away
and slipping into fiction –
or narrowed to the past few weeks:
the shoebox of a family;
the square dance of addiction.
Broken bones or melanoma
would be a lot more simple.
The afternoon is hard to treat
and has no diagnosis.
The architects have done their bit though.
The ward is new and wide with light.
To Drag the Saints back from Heaven
Anne Elvey
In the first week the saints will be available
only a little at a time. They will be busy
learning the names of things. Two or three
may attend memorials in their honour, but
you need to know you cannot count on this.
In the second week the saints will find heaven
heavy with rain as if they sat day after day
at the cyclone’s fringe. They will not yet
know that this is grace and may try to return.
Do not drag them back with your prayers.
In the third week they will begin to forget
that heaven and earth were separated once.
They will spend all night and half the day
enthralled with the songs of frogs. If you make
your prayers amphibious, they may hear you.
But if, at the end of the third week, you drag
them back, you will see in their eyes they are
not yours. To keep them, you will need to feed
them cheese and bread, toast and jam, lentils
with brown rice, carrots and apples, a daily
bread in season. You will need to show them
things whose names heaven has not learnt:
the coastal banksia’s bent answer to a place,
its shape against the sky. With spikes of
blossom you will pin them to your prayers.
True Listening in the Palace of Treasures
Michelle Leber
Ling Lun, legendary founder of music theory in China, created pitch pipes and discovered the ratios of the 12-tone scale (c. 27th Century BCE)
Miserable— the cloud emperor who sits under
the tree of no music
seen in that seventh month
ruled by the breeze of the heart.
No appetite. No sleep.
Slow breaths. His mind
assigning a passerby with the name of a bird—
Dark Bird Swallow, master of the equinox,
As a remedy— Ling Lun, busy with bamboo,
cutting between knots, scraped and carving,
blew into hollows.
Birds gathered
even the phoenix
ears uncoiling from their dark labyrinths.
Ling Lun’s flute, watery cadence, his first note
aligned with the firmaments,
that same tenor of the bird.
Six notes for summer.
Six notes for winter.
At this, how an emperor, all beings will travel
beyond the ordinary world—
with music,
the night arising from its prison to hold light
in trembling hands.
Twenty Questions
Peter Rose
after Donald Justice
Is it constant in your land?
Does it rain constantly?
Are you a real character?
Have you ever got your hands dirty?
Is your passport current?
Are we closely related?
Do you honestly believe what you’re saying?
Would you like to see the menu?
When did you last examine a scruple?
Have you ever forgotten your lines in public?
When were you last in the Holy Land?
Where is it precisely?
Are you a forerunner?
Have you ever been truly sorry?
Are you Cancer?
Do you worry about the future of the novel?
Have you found those binoculars?
Who watered the pitch in 1958?
Have you ever rhapsodised?
Would you mind completing a short survey?
Under the Radar
Stephen Edgar
Flaring and fading like the blips
That flash an instant on a radar screen,
The bellbirds’ brilliant little flecks of sound
Illumine and eclipse
The points where silence has been slung between
The branches of the trees. Such flimsy tips
To bear the weight it gathers on the ground.
As when you wade through water, slowed
And heavy, hardly able to progress,
Your senses, working through this thick dimension
Of stillness, share its mode.
Each leaf glint, shadow, bird note, each impress
Of foot on twig that snaps beneath its load,
More slowly but more clearly holds attention.
Once all the world was this. Alone,
And dozing through the spell of midday heat,
You register that chittering outside,
A neighbour’s telephone,
The drone of traffic on a further street,
The ticking house – each floated overtone
Dragged by the soundless groundswell that they ride.
And so it was when you were led
To where her barely conscious form lay waiting
And silence held the burden of the room.
And leaning by the bed,
You swayed in that abeyance, concentrating
To hear far off her scarcely warranted
And weightless breathing falter, and resume.
Up at a Villa
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
So, it felt alright at first, but now you rabbit on
expressing indisputable views on everything, in vivid
agreement with yourself, reinforcing the big Yes,
it having been determined that all popes and poets
can be no more than cocksuckers, arseholes, or merely both.
You smile with anger, red behind rimless glasses,
and right. Well, you could hardly be wrong, eh?
Even the pleasant CD cannot stem your fucking flow;
I wouldn’t dare to try, I tell you that.
Why is all this display of petty power so important
now to you: pretty well always has been. And why
does the furious cortex hunger after correctness,
in just about everything? Buggered if I know,