A Word

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Eleanor Lamb

I want a word with you
but I don’t know which one.
Love is too thick, too rich,
a fly drowning in red wine.

I want a small, careful word
to tuck away in my pocket
with some spare change and a lighter,
so it’s there when I need it.

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Moon Landing

Posted on November 1, 2012 by David Kelly

The solar wind that sweeps
across the moon
blows no dust
and makes no noise.
Meteorites land
more quietly there
than feathers fall here.

Our gift to the moon was
all that noise inside the Eagle,
the click of switches,
the dragging of pencils,
the sliding of zippers,
boot-scrape and impatient sighs.

As the Michelin moon-men
left their lunar campervan
and stepped down backwards
onto the iceblock silence
of the frigid grey dust
there was no clang on the ladder,
no whoosh of stepping into powder.
They broke aeons of sound drought
with resonant words,
the low pitch of dry swallow,
the iambic thump of heartbeat.

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What Will We Inherit?

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Rachael Mead

The galah and the goldfinch.
These trees but not the grasses.
Instinct.
Guilt.
History, with its lashing tail.
Obligation, passed into my hand like a stone.
My grandfather’s bible. Your mother’s pearls.
The rounded rocks lying quiet in the creek.

What will we pass on?
Only the fire can say.

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What I’ll Miss When I’m Gone

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Eric Paul Shaffer

I will miss the light. The south windows allow the sun to fill the rooms
from morning to dusk. After all, without light, there is little to see, wall
to wall, window to door, ceiling to floor, nothing but nothing but darkness.

And I will miss the way the light stands on the neat boards of the floor
and looks around, a gaze bounding round the room, reflecting only
on every surface and revealing all the corners and angles that the sun will.

I’ll miss the height of the house. Not that I like to look down on people,
but my walls and windows are high on the ridge, raised on wooden beams
and crossbeams so that the roofs of other houses are far below where I sit

gazing at the sea. And I will miss the freighters anchored off the coast,
especially at night when they light themselves like small islands on a grand,
barren, black plain, golden orbs gleaming between me and the horizon,

drawing my attention to where the world happens. The ridge across the valley
that rises like the great, green face of a wave, I will miss. A soaring surge
of earth, still moving but fixed before my eye, that ridge reminds me always

that nothing in this valley will long remain. I will miss the coconut tree
poised before the largest window, blocking the view of the streets below
with little scenes of sparrows, doves, and bulbuls of every song, strand,

and scrappiness. And I suppose I’ll miss the days when I’m home, and all
the noisy neighbours are at work or play somewhere far away, and that blessed,
vacant, and resonant calm steeps in the sun and shade on the tilted lane

and clustered houses. I’ll miss the flights of jets blasting from the airport,
spiking to the zenith in a dull rumble of rush and arrogance. I’ll miss the weird
pattern of roofs below, their oddly-chosen colors and the alternating shimmer

on shingles when all the angles change as the sun crosses the sky. And I will
certainly miss the nights, when I rise, barefoot, and glide to early windows
over the silent valley sprinkled with the lights of the restless and the negligent,

and above that lonely, electric pattern on the darkness of the earth are the stars,
telling the mythic stories, unread by eyes that cannot see beyond their own walls
and raised roofs, their locked doors, curtained windows, and purchased light.

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Your Silent Partner

Posted on November 1, 2012 by John Grey

I pride myself on making no sound
as I come down the stairs.
I imagine myself the first moments
of a kettle boiling,
or flakes of snow falling,
or even a ballerina,
all of me concentrated in one toe,
so small, so narrow,
the wood doesn’t feel a thing.

I am moving down this flight
like a wing arced toward the sun,
a feather fluttering.
I’m the paleness of my skin,
the combined weight of my shadow
and the years after I’m gone.
For all the sincerity of your kitchen radar,
you will not know it’s me.
To you, it’s no one.
To me, it’s how I rise.
Like a thermal. Like a ghost.

The first you’ll know of content
is my kiss upon your cheek.
There’ll be someone there,
compensating for your solitude.
Until then, there’ll be you
wiping tears from eyes
and me, the silent messenger,
with these instructions for your flesh.
Until then, you’ll be alone
with your thoughts.
But then I arrive,
and your thoughts
have something to think about.

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Dr Ko Explains Sky Burial

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Anne M Carson

Monastery, North Eastern Tibet, 1933

Here I have the majesty of solitude, uninterrupted awareness of buddha nature. Great lamas – like my Rinpoche – die sitting up, in wooden meditation boxes, consciousness controlling body until the very end. After death they rest in the clear light before body – a fruit which has come to ripeness – begins to decay. We call it thugdham. I hope to die like that. Oh, to bury myself in luminosity! To hide in spaciousness of mind. In the west people bury bodies in earth but in Tibet we want bardo of dharmata burial … For 49 days after my death the monks will light butter lamps to chase hungry ghosts away. A lama will do phowa prayers for my transition. Then the body will be taken to consecrated land for sky burial. They will cut the body up, blood will seep into earth, feed creatures underground. The remains will be offered to the bearded vultures – lamergeyers we call them – who wait.
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Ceremony

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Heather Davidson

You ask what I was raised from.
I want to say death; it held me so long.
Seedpods in the fields like burnt houses,
grass turned to matches. Somewhere
clouds hung their ghosts over crawling green,
thick with rain.

I was never dead and yet I was; how else
did they bury me? The bone rollers came,
put me under as a sunset flamed to rust.
The cells of earth crumble a thousand years
to brown ash.

You need a name, to be saved. I took mine
from skeletons like words no one could re-assemble.
You spoke mine, down with beasts at the tide,
past a gate the wind spread like iron lips.
You wanted me, did you, to come back.
Do you still?

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An Open Door

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Kristin Hannaford

Always a monolith of a man.
In the end we could scarcely discern your shape,
scarcely vision which grassy knoll was a shoulder
or if the low slung spread of sheet was the saddle
between ribs or hips. A mountain vanishing,
swallowed by a plumed bulwark of pillows
clouding inwards, enclosing your newly grim head.

Always, you ate. You were tumescent
with the globed honey of reason, tumescent
with hope. At the end, your body ate you.
It consumed the stupa of wild intellect
(and the quiet considerate heart)
that housed a harvest of unanswered questions.
You were lost to an undulation of bile.

Always, your brother holds you;
tonight he anchors your earthly self.
Yet our grief is fracturing its way – let loose,
as if gas, or water rising from a coal seam –
irrational and unknown. Time’s compass lost
to disobedient memories that threaten to set us adrift.
Always, you travel through lucent space.

Always, we wonder if you navigate
some other sphere, whole and articulate.
If you have left behind the slough of skin
you left behind, dismissed the frailty of bodily
humours and confounded your laptop’s pale green
blinking eye. Behind you, trembling silence
of a partitioned room and a door that won’t close.

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Not the End

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Emilie Collyer

You had red hands
put too much salt on food
hugged with tight arms
boomed Bach from downstairs
shouted at me for sleeping in
drove the car off the road
lied about how much you drank
made ginger beer that exploded
under the house
told me our neighbour David dropped
dead and didn’t comfort me when I cried
I wondered why it was him
and not you
you invited a stranger
to my sister’s engagement dinner
called me in India to see
if the earthquake had killed us
smoked Dunhill International
and decorated the Christmas tree
not with tinsel but painstaking pieces
of delicate silver rain
you had a pain and you
stopped eating
looked confused when the woman
came to talk about respite
you kept falling down
and we couldn’t lift you
the last time
you turned yellow
and the nurses said you were comfortable
at an Easter church service
I saw for an instant
that death is not the end
then I forgot again
and wished time would stop
you were in the audience
of a show I did
this was after you died
and the director said
it was the best performance
I’d ever given and could you
please come every night
I haven’t seen you since

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Stillborn (never the interlocutor)

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Kristen Roberts

when grandfather typed
the strike of the j on paper
always left a blur, a shadow
the way your name does when said aloud.

yours, the silent name
a thought word so seldom given breath
that it forms wholly between the lips
and impacts the air more heavily
than those that surround it.

it has not lost its surety
in that way of other words,
their syllables plundered and meaning flayed
by their casual incursions
but that’s because it’s without you.

your name, needing you to fill out its sides
and bring it music. Your name,
never thrown into a room or field,
never curled by a smile,
weighs far more without you.

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A Line in the Sand

Posted on November 1, 2012 by David Adès

1.

What did I know of consequences?
The game delighted, so I played
like a child, heedless, unaware
of the migration of senses.
First, my eyes, translating the world,
drifted into yours, layering sight,
mirror-mazing perception. Was it my face
then, or yours, that I looked upon?
Then, my skin stretched – the whorls
on my fingers like galaxies, the lines
on my palms like rivers across sand
dunes – and my body grew beyond
itself, beyond yours. With our left
hand I reached up to drape a fine
cirrus sky shawl across my shoulders.
With our right, I stroked the wind.
Our Siamese legs straddled distances.
I breathed your breath, you thought
my thoughts, both of us configured
into the folds of one space. Who was
I then? What were my thoughts?
Where did I stop and you begin?

2.

Yes, once there were no boundaries,
and we were both lost, adrift on land
extending in every direction as far
as shimmering hallucinations could
rise – the directions merging,
indistinguishable; the space around
us vast and thirsty; our words
emptying into it like the last drops
from a canteen, rivulets drying out
as they were spoken. Reckless,
I promised water, you promised
shelter when there was none –
and we cupped trust in our hands
and made-believe. Without boundaries,
we shrivelled in the heat;
the earth’s crust scorched our feet,
the unremitting sun burnt our skin.
I wilted in a haze of silent recrimination:
shamed, overcome by so much space.

3.

I/you/we do not occupy this space
alone. Place an ear against the stars
or on the ground, let your skin tingle
as if a storm approaches, pay heed
to the movement of ants. Resonances
multiply: a tension in the air, a low
hum, a faint vibration. Who built
this cairn of rocks? What spirit watches
over this place? What does this hill,
that tree, these boulders signify?
What other markers are strewn about
this land that you and I cannot see?

4.

Out of grief I drew a line in the sand,
raised a fence, tried to explain
that you would find me always
behind it, that you could come
and visit me here as often as you
want, on the understanding that
after each visit you would leave again –
so that I could grow back into myself,
my small body, my hands; so that
I could touch your cheek and know
that it was yours; so that I could be
outside the tears in your eyes.

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The Wisdom of My Mistakes

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Mary Branley

On this particular night in May
You’ll light a fire
Out or in, it doesn’t matter
Set the ritual like this
Take the sticks the jackdaws left
In the middle shed as an act of revenge
(but that’s another story)

Add a teaspoon of kerosene
Toss a fistful of incendiary words
And crack a match. Crosshatch three
or four young spruce logs on the flames.
Then blindfold choose a talking log
And place on top.

Know that your entire future lies in choosing well.
Fake the confidence it takes to complete the gesture.
It gets easy after that. Night settles into orange, grey
And black. Rare and sacred on this particular night
Are the candles burning uniformly. The wind from the east
Is shy in our northwest promontory.

The talking log is slow to start and whatever was said to the rose
To coax her open must be more vigorous with wood,
But density’s intricate legacy is consoling.
Whatever voice whispered sweetly to the wind
That made her soften, sends me a loving message too.
In sibilance. Don’t sophisticate.

Suppose on this particular night
The log talks to the wall for an hour and
Won’t address you at all.
Laugh. Know we all need an audience
the talking log is teasing you.
Beg, entreat the log to prophesy.

Just when you’re ready to admit defeat
and study the illuminated wall,
look up as the branches of the ash tree
reach for the ink blue heavenly sky
above your head, watch as the heavens sparkle.

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Duality

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Jennifer Liston

I was holler soft
in your tender way,
you were fierce and there
in my grim wasteland.
I may be nailed to a cloud,
seared by its silver lining,
you may prefer frayed yesterdays
to troubled tomorrows
yet ever the breath
is yours or mine:
who knows?

Fearless of ordinance
and hell’s enlightenment
we strip height from mountains
we dilute oceans
we thicken air:
in a future as fickle as changing minds
you storm nano
I cradle massive.

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The Conversation (Risen)

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Andy Jackson & Paul Mitchell

You were climbing, when I first saw you,
down into the floor of a Fitzroy pub.
Whose grave was it, again? Your father’s?
Our Father’s? Your own? No, your shadow’s.
It was mine too. You could disappear

easily into any crowd of real or typical men,
I thought then. Over ten years on and you’re still
climbing further in, trying to live
up to the poem’s title, Risen. What are we
trying to find? Or escape? Clue – if tradesmen

really should tease us both every day,
it’s not about the obvious thoughtless reflex,
but desire, what leans out of us towards others,
suffering in their various bodies under
the wheel of the world. Forget tradesmen, I mean

anyone. Sure – I know my anyone is not yours,
but perhaps what links my hump to your square jaw
is something about women or men or
poetry’s clichés on feeling. Abstractions.
But I’m assuming when I should ask …

Back then, as you descended, I lost sight of you
behind the crowd of heads. At the time
I thought it was unfortunate – now,
it seems like a scene you keep re-enacting
in order to escape it. Like climbing

onto a stage to become invisible. What we want here
will happen by accident if we try. Because actually
I don’t know you that well, but I do
sniff flowers in Coburg. Who wouldn’t?
By the way, tell me what you mean by “team”.

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She Who Shines in the Dark

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Mary Bamburg

What flavours did the deep dark have for you,
Eurydice, lost under the earth? What textures,
so far from the sun’s heat like a plush robe
around your fair shoulders? Did you
taste the sharp juice, the tiny pits –
the queen’s vivid red seeds
beneath your tongue?

The path back up was so rough,
and of course the dead go unshod.
The rocks scraped your heels,
dug into your dainty arches.
The memory of his song – his plea,
laced with the marriage hymn, the funeral wail –
trembled in your mind,
but with each step it grew fainter.
The light grew brighter.
He, obedient, did not turn.

The queen’s fingers are long and pale.
The queen’s hair is silken midnight.
The queen’s eyes shimmer like dark water.
The queen’s lips taste of pomegranates.

Did you catch your foot on purpose,
knock loose that one small rock to startle him
into a reflexive turn? Was it an accident,

or was it the queen’s dark glory set against
all the memories of mortal, fatal love?

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All Things

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Lisa Jacobson

Persephone
How can I tell her, my own mother,
that I long for the autumn to turn?
When I first take his seeds upon my tongue
I gag, but soon I swallow them with ease.
The earth swallows me in turn.
The bright world fades, means nothing.
I give it scant thought.

Demeter
I am your mother.
What else can I do but wait?
Though I gnaw at the branch
of the tree outside my room
which bears no fruit,
until my gums are bleeding.
Will nothing hasten your return
or the tree’s first shoots of green?
I have waited out more winter days
than I care to count.
I wring my hands until the bones grate,
my menses cease with the seasons
and only death to all things
will quell my nerves.

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Orchard Sour

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Michelle Allan

I’m collecting things
for a perfect life,
in a sparse garden
with a quiet lemon tree.

There’s an assortment of wine
corks tucked in the corner,
waiting for the elephants–
a graveyard of grapes.

During the night I grow
a polished claw-foot bath,
to scare the crows away
from the cherry twins.

With a pair of nail scissors
I trim the short grass
and carefully feed it
homemade lemonade.

Nectarine juice drips
in tracks down my arm,
the flesh fills gaps
between my crooked teeth.

Eventually I feel clean.
The sky no longer scares me,
but I still lie flat on my ribs,
bleeding blossoms.

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Animal Control Answers a Jackalope Emergency

Posted on November 1, 2012 by E Kristin Anderson

A woman called,
said creatures had
overtaken her garden.

Foul things, she called them.
Cursed things.

She may have been right
about the curse.

Sometimes
el chupacabra is a dehydrated coyote carcas.

Sometimes
a unicorn is a rhinocerous.

The tragedy, of course,
is how illness spreads –
rabbit to rabbit,
garden to garden.

There is no otherworld here,
only cancer, the tumors
unexciseable, leaving only shadows
in the dark.

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Choreographed Calabash

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Lynne Potts

Limbo a kind of dance, barely mentioning motion:

a dove, a dish thrown at the wall, a cavalier smileb

a pout that can’t be partitioned, your vague comment
merely: Don’t throw the calabash melon out.

Calabash, code for don’t throw, don’t abash, don’t cast about
for what you can’t say. Don’t dance the subject.

If by chance I found your meaning in a cryptic note,
you can’t say I’d advanced

my heart about the garden where I sit limbed –
bowed as the mourning dove in his spottery coat

spotting me here in the garden rows with crow,
(garden plot as context).

Please sit on the fence with me, doubt what we say,
(epoch disease: the quibble) help me

save this cumbersome calabash planted between
pirouetting delphinium, whining forget-me-nots.

Let all secrets remain in their pockets; I once tried to
say something certain; it died on the vine

though the rest of the garden
kept dancing.

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Hank’s House

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Mark O'Flynn

He lives in the last
house where every stone
in the street
has been thrown
through a window
at least twice
once to come in
and once when
he throws
it back out

some of them have specks
of blood
theirs or his
in the last house
there is no more glass in the frames
and no movement
anywhere
against the western sky
but for the flight
of stones

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Crow

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Philip Neilsen

Crows are clever.
They use sticks as tools,
speak non-idiomatic French,
start but do not finish cryptic crosswords.
Crows were the first to wear black to book launches,
to peck at wine while avoiding a rival.
A crow is watching you now.
It has your number in its little black book
probes the synapses of your brain
unfeathers your nest
has you where it wants you.
The crow is more inventive
than any of your lovers.

Nothing will ever be black and white again.
Here comes the pain, so bite on it,
the crow in your veins.
You’re not going anywhere now
alone.

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Another Story

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Ben Walter

Once there was a raven
girl wiping weary towels
across the face of spent
plates, tuning here and there
to my announcements as I
hold these colours open, cold
bears huddled in the pages
and chickens preening their
selfishness with wheat; close
these bindings, my nieces, as
we beacon a story, not lions,
snarling claws and a blue
balloon, voices unfurling
a bang; do you hear as I
involve us in this plot?
I am able, I can read
this to the end.

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Moose Drift

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Salvatore Difalco

The moose doesn’t mind the winter.
He perceives the frost and snowy boughs
without comment, without bitterness,
though snow encrusts his antlers.
A tremor shakes his flanks but he endures.
The world may be shagged with ice
but its glitters please the eye.
Yet the sun is an impostor
shining coldly in a cold sky.

The moose scuffs a pile of blue snow,
nibbles the branch of a pine tree.
His sound is the sound of the forest,
the sigh of the wind, a twig-snap,
an ice sheet crashing like a sidelight.
But the moose doesn’t flinch,
doesn’t see it as a rebuff to the day.

No, it will snow again, and he
will gather himself as the wolves
stream down from the snow-capped hills.

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lost in translation

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Meredi Ortega

treading water, i wait for her to jump

suspended between pontoon, sun rebounding blue

i find a bee, wings lashed to water’s surface

unable to fly or drown, happens to us all

soon marooned on my daughter’s foam board

damp forelegs forlornly towelling down

seems there are too many hot days and watery errands

in this place

overhead, the helitankers with their long tongues

i have pulled many bees from the indian ocean

one aesopic day, caught in traffic

they will come carry me high over the city

she jumps and the yellow board drifts

is retrieved by another swimmer

careful, a feathery kneed passenger

he hears watch out, there’s a bee

flips the board over and smiles, don’t worry i’m okay

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