from each other but never knew it, sang their Hosannas
to different Gods and croaked here only eighty miles
and twenty years apart. Would I assimilate
or be assimilated there,
an exile in a land of unfamiliar rain,
a thonged exotic flaw in emerald terrain?
No theme comes from exile except exile, something
no one bothered to tell the ex-pat generation.
Until now, I thought.
I watched some yachts puff south like beeery slobs, all gut
and no behind. A seagull carried on like a galoot
above my head and then the path began declining
into oblongs balkanized by weed-cracks, kindling
memories of jigsaws:
fitting patiently on wet Sundays piece to piece,
sifting through the pile for the opposite
of a promontory of clous: portly swastikas,
running men, whimsies, wheat sacks,
Swedens, Sulawesis, bits
of continent or a cauliflowered florescence, Mandelbrots
ferning into shapes running through my bloodstream.
And then the bigger pieces: the absent shape of you
to which no piece will fit, like emptied rooms
in a house no longer habitable.
Loss ineluctable: there is no cure, no magic zebra
crossing to a lossless world. Aslant in the breeze
I walked the cliff-top walk, totally alone
at the other end of love, on the way from one littoral
to another, balancing an act
in a world out of balance, piecing together words
to confront something, long ago put to the sword.
Level with my eyes a seagull hovered, motionless
into the wind. I passed beer cans in modern middens,
dandelions on the path’s port side
while slowly from the north-east, thunderheads of mackerel-
mottled clouds began to coolly spit on the caramel-
coloured cliffs. It’s funny how it worms
its way in, love, diasporated like a swarm
of angry bees bearding a heart.
The continents are the oldest divorcees, having drifted
apart for eons. Next to them we’ve barely tiffed.
But still you reappear, even if only as a pronoun
which has to be emptied out or not pronounced
as it once was: as you.
Almost anyone could be one of them,
the economy of love which we won’t fathom.
You can stand for anyone now, there is no end:
the reader of this poem or the one you need
as elementally as air.
And so I kept on walking, finding in a word the future
and the past in ever-repeating series bearing a kind of fruit
into the present. And as I walked, I came to resemble Achilles
racing the tortoise, never overcoming, in the end, a calculus
of ever decreasing lengths.
But I wasn’t frustrated — au contraire — I was fascinated:
for love, like every coastline, properly considered, is infinite.
Country Chinese Restaurants
Mandy Sayer
There’s always one in every town
Coonabarabran: Golden Sea Dragon
Dubbo: Fu Lee Way. Maybe your car
Broke down, or you’re on the road
With someone who doesn’t love
You anymore. Manjimup: Fu Hua
Kangy Angy: New Shanghai. Always
A fish tank in one corner, walls
Panelled with imitation teak, plastic
Scrolls of misted mountains, water
Falls, a lone man fishing. Toowoomba:
Ni Hao; Wangaratta: Koon Way. Vinyl
Booths, nylon lanterns, laminated
Menus flecked with soy, old prices
Rubbed out and handwritten in pen
A teenage girl at the back, hunched
Over homework, harangued
By her mother into waiting on you
Numurkah: Jung Sung Harbour
Gilgandra: Dragon & Phoenix
The chef has fled and the father
Is frying. They’re usually empty now
There’s take-away. Four-dollar
Cocktails & paper parasols. Maybe
You’re on the run – an unpaid hotel bill
Or worse, looking for something you
Never had. Mudgee: Kai Sun, Wagga:
Lum Inn. The wok-steamed weather
& Confucius in a cookie
Crowded Hour
John Tranter
Hint of flame and wild behaviour,
E, lemon, sour surprise and rave, your
Suspicious self out for a welcome airing
On Fifth Avenue, your midday saviour
A transparent fellow spirit, the caring
Caress of a martini smoothly preparing
Your conscience to accept a second favour –
Bartender’s gift of one half-empty bottle –
I, corn silk hair, love at full throttle,
O, blue shadows, delicate gloom
Pricked with traffic lights in the evening air –
U, olive green of underwater hair –
Scuba, the acronym, in the crowded room.
The Consonants
John Tranter
B, brave brown, C, icicle
Pendant, D, dun though pale,
F for faint mauve, fish and bicycle,
G, gothic paint in a green pail
H, an ambulance red and white,
J, lemon rain, K, snakebite,
L, bandage around M for kill,
N, no concrete freeway crush thrill,
P, torrid personals, Q for Quimper,
R, pale reptile, Sun and beach
And T-shirts, V, abrasive screech
Where a red vixen might scamper.
X is just black, Y mottled spoon,
Z pale grey sleeping under the moon.
Dandelion
Will Eaves
Skies cross my window with the sound off;
below a sprung herb shudders at life-speed,
rewound; upstairs letters joined in silence
from a man who was involved but hit upon
a delicate code to tell me of his New Year’s Eve
at Graubünden, “firework amazing, very long”.
In a drawer of old bills keys to rooms
that stay unlocked. Books everywhere, of course;
among them voices raised and heard, never alone,
the ones married to harp and flute. And luck.
Which of the psalms will hear the clouds as
they pass overhead, a stave of wires their nest?
What makes them beautiful? Why do they tear
themselves apart like ageing stars or clocks?
Darkness Speaks
David McCooey
None of it is true: I am
neither malevolent nor
mystical. You have nothing
to fear; I am the one who makes
things terribly bright and
dramatic when they need to be.
Like when I spill myself a
little at sunset. Night after
night you dream of me. One day
you will wake up properly,
&
nbsp; and there I will be, at last.
Your new and endless climate.
Don’t look at me; I don’t compose
any kindertotenlieder.
Dawn
Sarah Day
Dawn finds its way into the house
through every recess,
projecting on to walls oblique
slow-motion shadow cinema:
toy canoe and sailing boat
navigate the bathroom wall;
a trompe l’oeil window onto moving trees
configures near a kitchen cabinet;
water, in an unwashed bowl,
attuned to some vibration
ripples across the ceiling;
a teaspoon on a sill glances ...
through cracks and keyholes, light
lets itself into the house,
not as a sly intruder
but with radiant in-pouring,
a casual, brilliant right of entry
Diary Poem: Uses of Frank O’Hara
Jennifer Maiden
Years ago when John Forbes praised
my later work, he said my Problem
of Evil was influenced by Tranter’s
Red Movie, and being younger and furiouser,
I rang Forbes and explained P. of E.
was actually written first. The paper
printed an apology but wicked Forbes
started at once to speculate that Tranter
had based Red Movie on P. of E., a claim
of which I thought I’d better warn Tranter,
who laughed:
‘Anxieties of Influence’, and that phrase
came back to me recently when a reviewer
said I’d learned a lot from Frank O’Hara.
I explained to my daughter I’d never
read O’Hara and she, the Fire Tiger,
defended me on those grounds, so the reviewer
professed shock that I had never read O’Hara.
I wondered: am I shocked myself
really that I’ve never read O’Hara? I do
not miss O’Hara, but I said I would
write a poem called Frank and I about us.
The imaginary O’Hara would confess
of course that he has not read me either,
despite which we would feel quite at home.
I see us relaxed on a gritty tenement balcony
on a star-chilled American evening
with drinks in our numb hands speculating
why poetry is so much about denying
what one is not, and why anxiety
about influence is stubbornly so scary.
‘I’ve heard you use long lines’, I
would say, and explain, ‘The longer
lines in my last book were two typos I
just missed and not an urge to run
some novel verbal marathon.’ He might
reply, ‘My long lines were a try
at showing poetry is still not prose, however
long the line and to avoid the slashes
which Olsen thought pauses for breath.’
I nod, ‘I’ve used slashes, too, but not
for that, just to intensify
and quicken the pace.’ We would
be getting on quite well by then. ‘Someday,’
I’d say, ‘I would like to read you, but
of course now there is my current worry
that influence might be retrospective,
and that I’ll recognise your hand
in everything I’ve written, anyway.’ He’d say,
‘I don’t think it’s likely – aren’t
you more into the lyrical? You look
sort of more lyrical but that
might be the light.’ I would wonder: have I
aged back to O’Hara’s age? He died
before he turned forty and maybe
one ages to the time and company.
Or maybe there are such lost creatures
as poets and each meeting each at first
in any place is nervous and newborn,
under erudite, angry cover. My daughter
thought the critic was doing the haka. I
might have done the haka with O’Hara
had I read him, but in the ever
new American night I would rather we
still sat there still, regaining self-
sense outside the great archives of torture.
Did you mean iteration?
Melinda Bufton
The gmail interpolators algorithm my message to be about love poetry
They are wrong, all it is is
That I sent you a poem and said
love in my signoff.
To put the two together, presumptuous much, huh!
Machines – like data amoeba – sit back on their clever heels and think they are all smugly knowing about love.
They are not.
Even HAL, you do not get this even though you hung out with those guys for ages.
In Japan they labour yet to create these feeling machines
Always careful of the uncanny valley
And it wasn’t until I was ensconced in your circular screen that I realised
When the trance soundtrack kicked in and the small images spun like the
Talking rings
That I realised this was the technology you had developed
This was the sphere you had written
The code for, in the all-encompassing round
My mind took off in some various syntheses as I realised how conversant we are.
I could recognise you,
by the concept.
Disappearing Act
Felicity Plunkett
for Bas Jan Ader (1942–1975)
‘because gravity overpowers me’
Things tilt,
fall
over and we
do: stasis a moment
before the forwards-
jolt.
In a slippery-shingled world
gravity became your ludic conspirator:
your avant heavy with visions
of afterwards.
Your early work
charts falls: ‘Broken Fall (organic)’ from a bike
into an Amsterdam canal;
‘Broken Fall’ into a trestle;
from a chair perched
on the roof, becoming
again the bundle your mother
threw to make
an impossible escape. ‘Fall I’
Los Angeles 1970
can neither forget nor recall
Winschoten 1944.
For you at two
your father’s execution
meant only abandonment.
Resistance, courage, harbouring
the persecuted: ideas beyond
the world of your days.
The words of your work collect
a toddler’s small syllables:
PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME
Later, a film so stark
(then a postcard, another
film, a photo)
that unstopped tears
collect all tears:
I’m too sad to tell you:
testimony of one who saw
but could not phrase:
particles of innocent witness.
And learning through this
grief’s isolation
and the falling o
f all art:
thoughts unsaid
then forgotten
At the end
in Search of the Miraculaous:
a lonely voyage to
break a-
cross
the Atlantic
fall into the vanishing point
no roof, windows
tilt, no earth
all
tilt: the sea’s windows
opening to the miraculous.
(Note: Dutch-born conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader disappeared at sea during
a solo voyage and artwork called ‘In Search for the Miraculous’.)
Drowning dream
Bella Li
That August I began to dream of drowning. It was the season of water – strange storms troubled the air. All day I crept along the edges of rooms, avoiding the precious windows – half ajar, propped open with old newspapers – where the green sky pooled. Outside, whole oceans flooded the garden, encroaching on the house and its sagging porch. On the first floor the eaves – swollen, bloated with salt. On the second the mirrors, weeping sodden light; the carpets stained with moisture. On the third I studied the ceiling for cracks through which the rain might bloom. The attic and the landing damp. The skirting and the sideboards. The clocks. Only once (in the afternoon) I moved down to the basement, where a man – quiet and still as a mouse – floated face-down in the dark. Above us, the house hummed like a machine.
Dual Citizen
Tracy Ryan
1 Pass
Jus sanguinis, law of blood
as if by transfusion
you lived on, involuntary vampire,
I carry
by former marriage a mantle
you never wanted –
Swiss Australian –
wherever you lived,
you did not belong,
were the black sheep,
scapegoat.
Is this what you
impart, what I
inherit?
2 Assisted Passage
Lobbed across continents
with a sweetheart on the SS Sydney
Come to Sunny Australia!
no word of English but
this is the house that Jack built
lodged in a Nissen hut,
set to cut
lengths of metal
for a suitcase company
in a country that didn’t rate