Last night, again I wandered through the world
where everyone's implicated
as though I'd become a shadow alone,
the lonely implied,
not entangled, not entwined,
bound to keep supplying motive, delivering drive,
tourist, audience, flying trap to trap,
puzzling spectacle to idiosyncratic performance.
I drop crumbs and blood drops,
I scratch initials, waft perfume,
but where do victims dwell?
In February 2004 I went on a one-month meet-as-many-poets-as-possible trip to the U.S. A mobile phone would have made everything so much easier. I call my friend S from a public phone at LAX, eventually getting through. I dump my bags at his shared one bedroom flat and we go to a nearby market, where I buy some dice, candles, and the best cookie I've eaten in my life.
It's a commonly raised question within the Melbourne poetry community: how to bring poetry back into the public mind? Are we content as readers and writers of poetry to remain marginalised while sport maintains its deified position in this country? Moving Galleries, an initiative recently launched on Melbourne's trains, is an attempt to redress this imbalance.
Slivers by Ian McBryde
Flat Chat Press, 2005
Nine Hours North by Tim Sinclair
Penguin, 2006
Two recent Australian poetry titles – one from a 'cult' adult (and at times 'adults only') poet, another from a newcomer writing for 'young adults'; the former published by a new small press and the latter by one of the world's most recognisable publishing empires; the former experimental and minimalist and the latter conventional and extensive; and so on – offer formally different yet discursively complimentary views of the state of the poetic word. In spite of their blatant differences, Ian McBryde's Slivers and Tim Sinclair's Nine Hours North both convey a seemingly pessimistic discourse, one consumed with disenchantment, the death of things, and a growing awareness of 'the end'.
The Biplane Houses by Les Murray
Black Inc., 2006
Given the title of Les Murray's latest book, you'd perhaps expect that 'The Shining Slopes and Planes' – the poem in which the term “biplane houses” appears – would provide a key to unlocking this collection. In a sense it does: the poem evokes a runway full of simple Australian houses, entities that appear the least likely to sprout wings, organic or mechanistic, and fly. The poem implies that it is the people within these houses that possess the possibility for a non-literal take off, a spiritual or at least psychological flight. But for this reviewer the poem 'The Tune on Your Mind' offers a more satisfying access point to Murray's first collection with Black Inc.
In a sand casino we devour the sun
standing like two dimensional cut outs
spinning roulette under a three hundred degree rainbow.
I leave friends orbiting the night.
Neon lights with cues
push me into traffic's deafening rune
where subways converge.
Now, I slam against a naked human pyramid
balancing so high
I think it might spill
as simply as my last martini.
I meet a corpse in a dinner suit
he feels for my pulse under folds
of this green shantung frock.
It's a place you can't film.
His hands tap the fandango.
Spindly branches tangling my high fidelity.
The corpse in his crumpled dinner suit
corners Los Galapagos Boulevard
calmly stepping to a conga line's limbo.
I'm bent in tai chi's harmonising languor:
lost in dead spaces
between my minds fix
and a nicotine rush.
Some faces flick past
pages from a book I've never read.
He thinks I am like him:
he checks my vital signs:
says we're facing the wrong way.
His double breast shields me
from a city's metallic rage.
Later, at the sand casino
I order grilled parrot
from a waiter who juggles watermelons.
The corpse isn't hungry
he's shredding clouds
pleating napkins into geodesic domes.
Hooded boys frisk
the sidewalk,
somersault gutters
or stand around swinging bats.
The paper seller
at Angel
listens to “Do the Locomotion”.
Tourists hog footpaths,
stray across Queensway.
They feel safe in less hurried postcodes.
Windows here
won't open.
Praed Street Shops
sell Union Jack jock straps.
Girls want to look like Kate Moss.
Saplings as mannequins.
Wreaths pile up outside
Edgeware Road tube.
In London, tequila is the new vodka,
and vodka is the new tequila.
Some churches only open to tourists.
I want to take up religion.
I will lift my hand up and there will fall a silence
And I will call you as I will lift up my nose and
There will waft alluring aromas and the bombe will inflame
As I will lift my eyes and see all the hunger fleeing
And a healthy insatiability settling quiet upon desires
I will lift my voice up and say it was good and
You will lift your spirits up and say we tasted it we tasted it
Without making you feel at all
In lands very distant from you
I raised flowers which you like
I know
I left you by yourself
With unforgettable memories…
Every so often
You felt uneasy
Because of my badly digested words
You stayed sleepless…
During successive days
I dragged you towards mornings without a sun
I was in these pages.
I hurt you with touching songs which I liked
I touched you with my poems
Again and again, I drenched you
With my feelings…
I was in these pages.
I often took you for walks
On the most populated streets
Of Istanbul
With your heart beating
Your beliefs and acknowledgments moulded time
Behind blurred window panes…
I was in these pages.
The sky was different
Light was acid
Avenues were without people
Streets were without soul
When I lost you
In the stopping of a bus…
I was in these pages.
I made you wait until mornings
On the streets of Istanbul
I made you tremble in full jolts while you dreamed
During your sighs I threw your shades
Into seas
On blank pages I wrote that I love you…
I made your drawings
On all the walls of the city…
I was in these pages.
Not that I lied, or wasn't myself –
I don't know myself enough to tell –
but tried to do things with words,
alter events – like the hero
at the plane crash
who drags the pilot from the agitated fuel,
only to later confess
he wasn't even there,
or was – was there,
a lonely bystander in the field.
So too, I've put on poetry airs,
commander's wings.
I'd regret this more, send you a letter
to apologize, but no longer trust
what I might say in writing –
might end up singing the praises of
how everything which forms a meaning
does so as, like water in a flood, it finds its flow
in the force of its own going to meet the unknown
downstream. I'm not the conductor of stars,
can't make the sun desist from pestering
those who want more downtime in darkness;
I've watched the day end, outside,
glowing at the edges as the world goes
into a different mode, and cried,
for the way the air looked, or felt; but also
drawn comfort as smoke rises
from lawns where burning leaves,
as in a poem by Binyon or Burnside,
gather the visible surge that provides.
It is all waiting for the still repose,
The nightly kiss on a bended knee,
Half wit to half woo
The girl and the angry fool,
Brow beaten by a swollen moon,
And the crafty sun blazing
Like a blushing bride.
It is all listening to the ticking clock
A slick-eyed brother with a frozen heart,
Gazing at the stars with a sticky smile
As the bronze-faced girls undo
The boys from the human zoo.
It is all laughter with a wicked grin
The kiss of death on a silent ride
And all too weary to kill the bride.
Nomina sunt consequentia rerum
More than the dandelion these banksia
leaves could be prickly as lions' teeth.
But what name might reflect a tree
whose flowers are stiff as fossils
with pistils you could blow
to judgement day: no pappus globe
is going to dissolve and take flight
in a thousand directions, or germinate
a thousand dreams.
No, too full of sap to forget
the turning sun, this banksia is less
transient than any season's weeds.
They looked so sweet and content as they slept.
All snug and warm amongst each other.
I didn't want to wake them- but I had to.
they are My responsibilities.
I pull back their paper covers; I tense as I await their angry response –
their abuse.
Nothing yet. Just the quiet.
I undress them one by one. One rouses. Fiery, he screams at me in red!
His shouts and demands shock the others awake – wide-eyed!
They cry and wail and scream. Their wantings flash at me in red.
Water. Driving lessons. Riding Lessons. Petrol. Lunch money. Zoo excursions.
Play group. Electricity. FOOD! Oh! How could I forget FOOD?
They wave their paper selves at me like a barbaric tribe – cursing me.
The centrewank payments haven't gone through yet. They haven't gone through!
Locking myself in my room I slide down the wall – cowering in my corner.
I can hear them at the other end of the house. Their pounds on my door are deafening.
They know I don't have it. I give and I give! They take and they take! I have nothing left.
Guitar lessons. School shoes. Soccer practice.
I stand at the kitchen counter and stare at them. One taunts me – her demands in bold. She dances and waves herself about. I launch at her. I wrap my hands around her brittle neck and twist. She tears. In fury I keep tearing. Dismembering. I turn to the others.
Their paper limbs float to my dirty kitchen floor.
I creep down the hall. They looked so sweet and innocent as they slept. If only they knew mummy's pain of being a poor provider.
If only they understood the bills were taking over.
If only they understood.
equality
i want to give it to you from behind
you my precipitous coastline:
a beach in places inaccessible
fading to conditional parameters
(pressure, entropy and volume
stance drawn and coiled
yeah, I want to take it from behind
liberty
do you want it from behind?
representing the boundary line
numerous small caves open on the coast
and springs more or less impregnated
while iron lime etc are common
phases of substance
plotting a parobola of anxiety
strata generally about vertical
but in some parts broken
contorted foliated and overturned
yeah, I like it from behind
solidarity
you're gonna get it hard!
all varying in color from dark blue and dark red
and purplish brown ochrous yellow
and clear pale chalky pink
change that occurs
between two or more small veins of quartz
between lamina
containing the world's distant memory
a reversion to the minor strain
on or about
melting polar ice caps
yeah, we all like taking it hard!
a man sat by a fire at the edge of the world
a fish on his spear, drying
the waves slid quietly onto the shore
the birds slid across the water,
swooping sighing, their voices longing
the man heard and he sang along
humming and sighing his own sweet song
and threading his net as the fish hung drying
when he left there would be no sign
no mark, no monument, no shrine
taking nothing away, he left nothing behind
just a charcoal patch and a tune he made when
he sat by the fire at the edge of the world
in quiet, but for the waves on the beach
he sang and sighed and the fish hung drying
and the birds, they swooped and sighed
Someone must have ignored the facts. And now they've frozen over,
we, of course, ice-skate. And after all the talk of flight,
must make mention of the pigs.
No one minds the dead bodies in the street or the things happening all over them.
The fish on bicycles, well, they were expected, but blood-stained bullets
retracing flight paths? That was a sight for the eyes in the back of our heads.
When liquid paper fell from the sky, statutes flew and stuck to tree trunks.
Then, because they could, crowds caught the wind to desert prisons,
watched inmates click through turnstiles, uncertainly as life and tax cuts.
They come from the Netherlands,
one of the organizers proudly explains,
pointing at the purple tulips on a shelf.
Around the flowers hovers a bee: it just makes me wonder
if this bee also comes all the way from the Netherlands,
leaving its queen and colony just to follow its flowers.
I do not like green eggs and SPAM,
I will delete them, Sam-I-Am.
Have a BIT, take a BYTE,
Try it, buy it, then you might!
You're sure to lose / you're sure to gain,
Human blues / cockroach pain,
Hair on body / hair on head,
Politician Noddy / Big-Ears' bed,
A pound of flesh / a pound of muscle,
A writer's Pound / pearls of hustle,
Weight off mind / your soul's vacation,
Rewind time / life's Playstation,
Your stomach gut / your soft-boned marrow,
Your red tongue cut / your spirit shallow,
Sam, if you will let me be,
I will consume them, you will see.
You will love it! Once you bite
A megabit, a megabyte!
When you unzip / you will enjoy,
Fairies, pixels / plastic toy,
Trouser pants / private leisure,
Spectacle case / virtual pleasure,
Wallet or purse / faster flicks,
Your inhibitions / digital chicks,
Your parents' pin / your fantasy,
Your sensory pad / your fun hands-free!
Your religious code / your rightful education,
Your shoulder chip / your freedom nation!
I do not WANT green eggs and SPAM,
Leave me! Leave me! Uncle Sam!
my feet are birds on whats left of the trees
the dream reconciles me
living here without goodbye
& so you know that somethings wrong
an atmosphere a general
abnormality where needs of
affection transgress boundaries &
ghosts arent laid to rest
this is the kind of dark we move in
& the breaching allows eruptions
under an imaginary cover our desires
erect them permissiveness whispers
it would take dangers but
romance is a danger itself & is a flat any
different are all pulses ends in
themselves beans counted once
& forgotten
there could
be so much we could do with within these
social patterns so delicately enforcing decay
time is of the construction &
expectations formed during
the cold war of infancy so therapeutic
no doubt yet perhaps damaging
also the general echoes in unexpected
attitudes how is power distributed &
to or is it assumed
though each environment takes on its own cast
a breeze blows out a candle the
mistakes layer themselves in
a life & we walk on ever headier beds
peas are needed each pale &
single child the wreckage
divested within easy distance
sort it out & carry it back down the steps
greatness
among the most domestic rules
the man checking
passports
has undone sneakers
*
eating rice
looking at
fields of rice
*
little black bug –
how long have you been
on your back?
*
corpse
awaits cremation –
a goat has a nibble
Some Other Beneficiaries
(After Les Murray's “The Beneficiaries”)
Hogamism higamism
The Liberal Party
does not praise Racism.
Most ungenerous. Most odd,
when they know it's what finally
won them their thirteen-year war
against Paul, against Bob.
Portrait of Doomed Youths
(After Wilfred Owen's “Anthem for Doomed Youth”)
What happiness for these who live as chattels?
Only her monstrous personalised ringtone,
Only his triumph in playstation battles
can make them feel they are not owned, but own.
No poetry for them; words disempower.
No New Idea, save the magazine
a shrill, demented magnate in a tower
excretes to supplement the TV screen.
What mourning for them, if and when we mourn?
Not by the poets, but by prose-police
shall their history be assembled piece by piece.
The golden arches under which they're born
shall provide the childhood friend that each child finds;
and every day this dumbing down of minds.
Anachronistic Torso of Amanda
(After Rilke's “Archaic Torso of Apollo”)
Children hear the legend of the missing head
and fear hemorrhages in their eyes. For this torso
is ablaze with fluorescent lights inside
like a nightmare; and suddenly they know
why they will be locked in here. Otherwise
each granite breast could not chill them so, nor could
a rictus run through adamantine hips and thighs
to a procreative centre merely carved.
Otherwise by now this stone would be defaced
by democratic seagulls and graffiti,
and so would not destroy a child's last hope:
Would not from all the borders of the country
announce who we are: that this is not a place
where they are wanted. You must change your vote.
“how big is the actual heart? – the size and heaviness of a handful of earth.”
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Today we heard your heart beat,
sparrow-quick, a thready pulse
in the static of some vast inland sea;
unmapped water, as yet unnamed,
which laps at the inner shores of me
where small, washed stones
seem always on the point
of dissolving.
1. BIRTHDAY DAY
Pollock lipstick
vagabond slippers, the snug imprisonment of tracksuits
smeared with 11:30 soft-diet lunch.
Begin to hope the progress
behind pharmacological ramparts.
The real medicine is touch
all other expertise unnecessary.
I am now a fixture here
the nurses chat at visits, even read my books
between wiping bums and perennially guiding Tommy back to bed.
Clinical notes recorded on the verge –
chasms of new molecules, pneumonic harmonica and missing teeth.
I sing along at this birthday party
when everybody else thinks it's theirs.
Cordial and cake fly like confetti
slow motion kindergarten.
There's the bazaar worth of plots afoot
scheming over nothing
stolen glasses
or dentures. Pirates are aloft in the rigging of their wheelchairs/
aluminium walking-frames glint dangerously in a
gatecrashed sunlight that cranks gaiety to a cackled fever.
2. PICK ME UP
Each visitor is like a death, still hanging on
rusted to every mother as she's caught keening into where.
The constant spatter of TVs
worlds coming in to seduce away facts
that have still clung on
(steel hooks in the cerebellum).
Always music somewhere
cassette recordings of pianos built with ceramic tiles instead of strings
Underneath the Arches
We'll Meet Again
(and just once My Generation sent a ripple of fear
through attendant babyboomers).
The heart patch of fort nursed,
mouths open like day
eyes turn tail in prayer
for this week's Dearly Departed.
3. KIND REGARDS
My mother is “such a lady”
and they love her in the way
of pedestrian driftwood, stars and paper cuts.
The dependable burn of cigarettes,
flags of clarity and abyss, alternate horrors each
in separate ways. Time as soil erosion.
Some kind of word in a sleeping night.
Commonwealth Care Standards
and the guilt of children.
Nothing here is unmanaged
yet there's a kind of anarchy,
painted over every three months and
marked on coloured charts.
Families play a hackneyed role –
their fret, love
and secret wishings.
It washes over staff who've seen it before.
There are always better,
always worse actors for these parts.
It's a morality play
written in DNA
´cause Mum's dementia
will probably be our inheritance.
Partners and doctors monitor afternoon snores,
measure our decay.
4. LOST POST
This is some kind of harvest
old flesh on brittle bones
and grey wheat above
episodic eyes.
Who says death is better?
Most of us
(today- tinned salmon in a weak tomato sauce).
Usually not the residents
rusted in
sometimes even the mad, tender collegiality
of senescent love affairs –
even though she calls him
by another name and his face
is netted alongside unrelated memories.
In the sound of the sun,
every day is new.
Ambulances arrive
more regularly than friends –
there's the thrill of the ride
beneath panic, balms
and the silent rite of agony.
These veterans wear their ribbons of scars.
Pain management.
Come half past five everyone breathes easier, a sort of tranquillity,
when That Bloody Vera starts nodding off.
An almost accidental smear of yellow
beside the strident gold
of our more important streets, almost
like a break in colour lines, the street directory derailed.
Between Port Botany and the Gateway to Australia
pedestrians are by definition suspicious
no footpaths or signs
beyond contaminated high water,
harder air. Truck Territory
no stopping, metal-mob roar plus the mating preen of jets
above a grey-stained pelican.
I face a dried and battered screen
for both macadam and the open sea. Unsettled land
is where the wars break out. Reaving in cotton blends
people choose the easiest answer –
our stakes too high for ambiguity
or pause.
We never leave the checkout queue, reached
the full-junkie stage of capitalism
more shit, less hit.
Sand is history
but it can only be read in silence.
The old terracotta pipe leads out
then finishes, or dives beyond our ledger.
Eat our lunch joylessly
fretting over dinner.
No one will offer to fix this strip of sand
it even lacks a name,
this one-lane remnant beside the core
of that which makes us modern.
Cormorants camp on broken piers
weeds and cattails form the fence
between peace and atrocity.
Fresh lungs bleed across the suburb of containers,
Happy Meal wrappers are our time capsule.
Beside solvent clear water,
discarded bottles of Deep Spring refuse change.
Do not feed the birds
they interrupt airport traffic.
Until the Seventies, gangs buried their crimes here.
We modern mass villains are far less clever.
This beach is a border
though so porous you can see
seagulls drinking freely a sullage pond
with gastric striations in a poison grin.
It has no name, in a few more years
simply won't exist. Its driftwood
was once its trees.
We race new tides in eating land.
Here in the downiest part
of the New World Eagle.
Will our leaders be tried for slaughter?
Will we?
The 2.20pm KL and London has left.
