Lebanese Poetry

Posted on July 1, 1998 by π. o.

He came over (to the
counter), ordered a coffee, and asked me
if I was Lebanese (cos he
was) – I said “No” / Greek.
He asked me,
what I was reading and I said “Poetry”.
I asked him,
did he like it, and he said he did.
I asked him,
if he knew a poet called Nazim Hikmet
and he said:
“When did he live?”
I said,
at the turn of the century (in
Turkey) – he spent a lot of time in prison
layed down
a few steps
…but
the bloke, couldn’t say he had
so I asked him
if there were any good poets in Lebanon
and he said “Omar Khayyam”.
I asked him, if the papers (in
Australia) published any poems
and he said, they did
but their meaning (their
meaning) he said, was too BIG (too too
big) and a lot of it
got lost in translation. He said, the poets (in
Lebanon) were very clever; They’d
show-Up at the market, and start
reciting their poems.
One of the poets (for
example) would start reciting a poem
about the NIGHT (say)
i.e. How beautiful it was, with the moon
and all the people walking up’n’down
the esplanade, and so on
while the other (poet)
would take an opposite view: A poem about
the DAYLIGHT (say): The kids (out on
the streets) playing in the gutter
and so on; And this, he said
would go on back’n’forth back’n’forth (all
night) until one of ’em
ran out of things to say (sticking closely
to his chosen subject).
I asked him, if he could
remember one, and he said he could.
He said, he could
remember one about “Horses + shoes”!
One of the poets, he said
started waxing-lyrical, about how the RICH
walk around on plush carpets
and about how the POOR
have to make do with the hole in their shoe
and the audience (and the
audience!) he said, gave him
a tremendous ovation, when he finished
cos they liked him.
Then it was
the other bloke’s turn, he said
and he began reciting a poem about
hundreds of Horsemen
racing towards a red-ribbon on the ground.
He said, all
the Horsemen were lined-Up (behind
the starting line), and when the GUN went-off
the horses-hooves hit the ground
so,ooo,ooo hard
that the whole sky became filled with
horseshoes.

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

Shroud of the Gnome

Posted on July 1, 1998 by James Tate

And what amazes me is that none of our modern inventions
surprise or interest him, even a little. I tell him
it is time he got his booster shots, but then
I realize I have no power over him whatsoever.
He becomes increasingly light-footed until I lose sight
of him downtown between the federal building and
the post office. A registered nurse is taking her
coffee break. I myself needed a break, so I sat down
next to her at the counter. “Don’t mind me,” I said,
“I’m just a hungry little Gnostic in need of a sandwich.”
(This old line of mine had met with great success
on any number of previous occasions.) I thought,
a deaf, dumb, and blind nurse, sounds ideal!
But then I remembered that some of the earliest
Paleolithic office workers also feigned blindness
when approached by nonoffice workers, so I paid my bill
and disappeared down an alley where I composed myself.
Amid the piles of outcast citizenry and burning barrels
of waste and rot, the plump rats darting freely,
the havoc of blown newspapers, lay the little shroud
of my lost friend: small and gray and threadbare,
windworn by the ages of scurrying hither and thither,
battered by the avalanches and private tornadoes
of just being a gnome, but surely there were good times, too.
And now, rejuvenated by the wind, the shroud moves forward,
hesitates, dances sideways, brushes my foot as if for a kiss,
and flies upward, whistling a little-known ballad
about the pitiful, raw etiquette of the underworld.

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

Fremantle Anchors

Posted on January 1, 1998 by Michael Heald

They’ve let their breath out now
and are taking it easy, lying back
or propped on an elbow, giant chain
trailing like strings of bubbles.
Most look straight through them
as if they’re a shrivelled fence,
though children’s hands approach
and nibble them like fish,
the way they do the flesh of the old.

Arrows shot in slow motion at stability,
palms like shovel-blades, without them
those arks of Europeans couldn’t have stopped
and steadied themslves for the decisive
stride ashore (the strain it was
told in one stock bent at right-angles,
sail-power as a circus strong man).

Fabulous bones from the throat
of famous motion, amongst them
you notice your own free breath,
lifting and falling like the swell,
drift cautiously as if that fearsome weight
might jerk you to a dislocating halt;
get a vision of these as moments
of an iron acrobat’s tumbling pass.

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

To the Soviet Embalmers

Posted on January 1, 1998 by Rod Mengham

This one cartouche surrenders
the famous curse. Nil advice

on sharing the tasks
preparing the ground and pruning.

Pick-your-own name as a performance
I am out of touch with

mortal illness. The memory skids to
her box of tricks right there
in the Attic vase. Numerous other

sole agents setup their stalls:

impassioned coughs and
counterfeit magpies

drink from the well before the assembly
detour ends. You may magnify the quandary
and its whispering roots;

for the martyr nailed to local colours
unable to utilise the construct

is just outside the rocket stadium
in the strong toils of reverse thrust.

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Looking Back on th Sixties

Posted on January 1, 1998 by Eric Beach

lust pure lust
beyond persuasion
beyond ego beyond gender
kids are a trip
& a vicious skipping rope
drowned geoff in two inches of water
somewhere up in th blue mountains
geoff
last to take off his undies at nimbin
waylaid by smack
held up by suicide
I chased him to th railway bridge
d own past th R.E.
he told me to fuck off or he’d smash me
once he was good & angry at me
I left him
he drove my car down th steepest hill in brisbane
cracked a concrete post, this ex-major watering his lawn comes over to get geoff
out of th mangled wreck, geoff tells him
‘fuck off’
‘it’s all blue in here’ he tells us
in his blue hospital pyjamas
we we re on magic mushrooms
next bed this old guy is examining his cock
his mother tells him sharply
‘put it away’
my lovely terri who took my brother to bed
after long intimate draws at chess
had her arms around a suicide
angel to him devil to me
in th next room unable to sleep
I think of how terri fell out of her dress
me at my typewriter staring out th window
then turning to her
buttons flying
h ow about a fuck she said
couldn’t we go out first he said
movies she said
but I want to talk he said
about previous sexual experience she asked
I’m clean he said
how come he’s so sure she thought
I’m a widower he said
are you still in love she said
he took her to bed

are you going to move in with me & my five kids or what she said you’re kidding he said
yeah but you panicked she said
I like it just here he said
stamp-collector she said

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

On the Train to Geelong

Posted on January 1, 1998 by John Mateer

The train pulls us along.
Who knows the difference between travelling
and waiting. The window
has a flat tawny landscape. Einstein
has the clock. Factories
muddy with rust and pastures fenced
by threads of sunlight tear
past our eyes. The posts and roads
running alongside the track
are too busy pacing us to wave.

Like blue mushrooms appearing overnight,
the huge bourgeoning You Yangs.

As their spore, the ash of stars,
we start speaking.

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Pseudopanax

Posted on January 1, 1998 by Joseph Zaresky

In the botanical gardens stands a tree –
nothing like the real panax
but trying, year after year.

Pseudopanax, the day will come
when they who pass by without a glance
will make a crowd in front of you:

the director of the gardens herself
will dip a little brush in white paint
and strike out pseudo from your sign.

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

If I Was Delacroix, I’d Be a Dickhead

Posted on January 1, 1998 by Arthur Spyrou

After the murder of her children,
there was a devastation in her eyes
that brought to mind The Garden of Delights.
The way she looked over her shoulder
across a pre-Raphaelite form,
wading from deep water to the beach
as if she understood the war being waged against her
by the world
urging it on like a wounded animal
throwing a smell across the centuries to now
through hamlets, hammocks, palaces and streets,
the one cruel smell
of forests burning in the memory
of her loins,
her one cruel copper smell
of woman.
And I detect
from the adoring way Delacroix painted her
amidst riotous nudes saddled
on zebra, leopards and boar
reasons why I once had found her flawless,
and something of the reason
why I left.

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Johnny Wheel

Posted on January 1, 1998 by Trevor Poulton

sergeant john wheel was blue/ very

blue but lost his way/ like crooks do whose glory
days are waning and find solace lifting barbells in a
gym/ with children peering on/ johnny/ you could
trust him/ he was beyond police street directory of
life/ bit psychic/ took you right into his head

where it’s hard to plan your escape/ john wheel just
pulled the pin/ some say he’s locked up in hills
kyneton way/ and that everyone’s out of his mind/
watches native birds light up the bush around him
at dusk/ their

speeding is just self preservation nothing else and that
the spent shells of gum trees means re growth/
a mate reckoned once that wheels sat on his double
bed/ shared a joint/ tried to talk him out of death
but he also wanted information/ pauli

would say nothing/ but somehow he felt touched/
wheels never painted him into the wall but could
h ave/ he’d help you if he felt there was something
wrong when you could find him/ but he wasn’t like
most cops/ writing up tickets or out of the van

pissing on with licensees at the back of hotels/ or
making love to single mums in the housing
commission flats/ we all knew what was going on/
carlton cops could never keep secrets/ there was a
senior/ always drunk/ every week tell

you how he manslaughtered someone during an
interview/ but never got charged/ once I read
wheels name on the front page of the sun/ asked
what was the breakth rough/ just said meticulously
it was intuition/ probably thought he was having a

joke/ sergeant john wheel the loner/ tracked down/
the young constable with the bro ken heart driving
north non-stop across the border to brewarrina
chasin’ this poet coral when he was supposed to be
on watch-house/ wheels brought him back for his

own good/ that one made us laugh/ I use to drink
with him a bit/ talk in general terms/ at stewarts
hotel/ across from the cop shop/ where everyone
use to mix back then/ sometimes you could spot
him in the side lounge with autopsies professional

crime/ the points of his eyes/ would tell you not to
walk in/ one day he said to me he was leaving/
said/ ‘it’s a promotion & premonition’/ he said
‘you’ve got to have more than one reason for doing
things/ more than one motive otherwise

you fail’/ chewing his cigarette end/ wired up in
stripes/ and government supplied shoes/ ended up
on one of those/ victoria police protection schemes/
doing time/ not necessarily because he had done
anything wrong/ there was a contract

out on his kids/ even the hat felt pity/ ‘one of the
few cops not frightened to over step the mark’/ he
said/ ‘but that put a stop to him’/ reminiscing with
a cronney the other night/ he said to me/ ‘you don’t
call it burning out/ you call it fuckin’ history’/ then

he told me/ with those words it was my bloody
shout/ you appreciate/ colourful language in
carlton

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Concatenation

Posted on January 1, 1998 by Zan Ross

This lithograph of four turtles – I’ve
carried it in my satchel for months, its corrugated edges
dig it into fingerpads as I search for
pens, lectures, tutorials, the thrust
of the treatise, dust from books
fifty years old masking synapses. I stroke their cool, smooth
shells, a wet nose against an indexed knuckle, a stringy tale taken
delicately between two fingers – secret comforts,
armour, amore. Is this how we are:
armoured, encompassed, all four directions or
(mocked) soup for the nouveau riche: crystal,
Royal Doulton, Irish Linen? and the door to our
boudoir left open, no room of our own –
a brother, an uncle, a sister, a grandmother snoring in
content We withdraw, fold into ourselves no matter
how much
we long for violation, to be ravished by
a moon descending in the shape of a swan, in the tender flesh of
a Nairobi spring. Is this what we
do? how we
interrogate any Fate that slips between the sheets with us,
awkward as a bicycle? one more year scraped back
to the canvas, gouged retribution, coy
as a Regency virgin, tortoise shell comb confining
a rope of hair

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

The Ride

Posted on January 1, 1998 by M T C Cronin

Let us imagine that New South Wales is a paper folded in the pocket
of a young motor mechanic on a Harley Davidson

He’s torn it from a magazine from an article Called: “There’s nothing
like a really good day in America”

While it’s light he tries to make as many miles as he can (occasionally
converting into kilometres) And by night he’s pre-booked into a series
of motels where the restaurants sell steaks and nobody lets you drink
alone

While it’s light he tries to make as many miles as he can (occasionally
converting into kilometres) And by night he’s pre-booked into a series
of motels where the restaurants sell steaks and nobody lets you drink
alone

In the end they went back without him But never really came home
because he had where they lived close to his chest the paper wearing
thin and being just the place for a love letter (or perhaps a few words of
reminder)

We heard that adve n t u re mistook it for his heart and tore it fro m
corner to corner But the old bloke he worked with who is still hanging
around the space where Marrickville once was Says:
He used to work for me and
didn’t do much
Then I worked for him and
did everything
It’s funny
He was a bloody good listener

(The wind still whistling past his ears
The human form of emptiness

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Drift

Posted on January 1, 1998 by J S Harry

Her bottom —
like a Sherman tank?
What would that look like?

She’s sitting
on a low stone wall
facing street.

It’s a 1997
person, passing behind her,
who lobs the simile.

Those words,
directed towards
her flesh,
suggests a drift
backwards
into history. Imaginations,
travelling out, dredge pictures
of Vehicles — Military
mind as reader
runs through her memory: which
famous Sherman
was the tank
named after?
How did it move?
Which model Sherman
WAS THE PASSERBY
THINKING OF?

However crude the simile
it’s not a grenade, can’t fall
back, upon the 1940s (before
she was born) (where the tank’s
action was)
real, with its pin out.

No simile
can smash one’s bones
from its
machine-gun turret
or crush a human form
hers — or anyone’s —
as the Sherman might have, once,
rolling casually on, leaving
behind
a death …

Wording
round anything
suggesting drift … thoughts
moving effortlessly forwards,
backwards,
sideways
into abstractions
quite bottomless.

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

A Quarterly Persona

Posted on January 1, 1998 by Michael Farrell

imagine me for example legs apart making
flappings deflatings this could be the way
i am with the brilliant company you
associate with a quarterly four times a year
theyre here boring socks of me & friends
colleagues theres no round gesturing i
assure you no honeypot buzzings or
big bare breastings strictly i keep to
playing something never assumed for
the daily poems or amorous encounters
im flat abstract akimbo at times yet
gently sloping arguments to the ground
i acquire a classical architectural taste
attain a high tone & waste no paper

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Poem in England

Posted on January 1, 1998 by Luke Davies

Squirrel, hare, woods, grouse, words I guess
I’ve always wanted to put into a poem, and never

had reason to. It’s summer in England in Addington
and now here I am and here they all are

in the poem because I saw them all today:
reason enough. Nice words anyway. We’ll walk through

the spinney or the copse. Not the bush, not here.
My bedroom is the Red Room. In order to distinguish it

from the East Room, or the China Room
or the Apple Room. And because it’s red: walls of roses,

and a view of the rose garden from the window.
The Red Room is three hundred and eighty-six years old;

somehow I feel privileged to be occupying air space,
as if I feel the million breaths of the sleeping departed.

I’m in England! Jetlagged, but hey, fuck, I’m in England!
How does life happen, the way you get older, and it finally

starts to happen? The way the sadness and the happiness
finally make room for each other to just be there?

Doesn’t matter where I am. So that even in England,
in the sadness of the moving from, there is also

the coming to, in the blue convergences of summer.

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Sydney

Posted on January 1, 1998 by James Lucas

1
Three UK years & a day long haul
to hear it strange: the Heathrow tongue
stretched flat at Kingsford-Smith
dessicated as Mascot lawns look;
fruit coughed up in DECLARE IT FOR AUSTRALIA
quarantine stalls recompressing feet
lop-sided on an interrogative lilt
& customs explanations don’t sound
pat – I’m through ARRIVALS the turnout
mambo in fruitsalad & lorikeet as if
history stops with carnivale & the state casino;
or sensing a poem here has to include bingo
jism & guilt; that it should clear a throat,
colloquial as currawongs: their call.


2
Cheap eat café hairs of the dog
the beach takes a bunsen
to eyestrain sand, crinklecut, whitehot
as blonde dyke glamorama crewcuts
do sushi: I didn’t inhale,
watched skaters blade the promenade
backed by spraycan art & overlooking
a kilometre of lightly salted
skins we’re delicious! Can I sting you
to wet each the other, bright as a diamanté
navel stud front reflecting at speed?
How mindful of self-aware, critical spins
on body-piercing we culminated nowhere
near the un‘important’ water, avoided junk.


3
Did flying south outstrip the blue pencil
granted we’re easy with an either-handed grip
being unrapped? Anything goes local style
in your face as Parramatta Road billboards
that’s the myth, struthious as gritted teeth
& eyes from wound-down windows. A ‘68
careers not past being druckfucked from the zoo
at western plains, they’re culling private demons,
angels had it with petrol fumes. Sirens
squeal at lanehog rush approaches to
the Cahill’s obligatory harbourscape:
at its fore & aft juncture less like sails than
buttocks rising from a fussy hem, operatic
prelude to dunk me, take me brash.

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

White

Posted on January 1, 1998 by Hugh Tolhurst

(Lattimore’s Iliad 1.1 )

A ream of cheap paper, I said to her,
you could sell me a ream of cheap paper.
The selfsame brand as pallets I have fed
into loud photocopying machines
when deforesting my way to the rent.
Pale as a promising relationship,
a film to be underwritten, that job;
the white manuscript takes off a blue dress,
curls back before the touch, offers up lips,
“Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son…”

Posted in 02: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Heet

Posted on July 1, 1997 by Tom Clark

Az ii wondurd
– loenliy not uloen –
daon paadhz uv liit
dhe sun on mii bak
and ii – dhen despuret
fur sum luv – feeling hot
and flushd – mii neediy fraon
must huv werkt its wundurz
fur dhai smiild at mee
– loenliy, long, lost
on kongkreet korudauz –
waumd tou mee
in dhiy upresiv sumur heet
and toald plezent tailz
uv udvencurz on dhe hii weekend:
‘Wer you dhaer?
Wen it hapend, wer you dhaer?’
‘Oah…
yaer.’
Good frendz, dhoe
puhaps wun oevulooks et
in dhe sunshiin uv
– paur luvurz kworul
on dhe blisturing streets,
lumenting butraiyul
and aij-haadend duseets –
bencez and shaid dhat giv us
dhe kwiiyet beerz uv soludaretiy.

Posted in 01: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Vlado Perlemuter Playing Ravel

Posted on July 1, 1997 by Peter Boyle

The elegant sadness of this music
is just the first layer.
Beneath enter again
the corsetry of a remote childhood,
the bindings between the shoulder the neck
the puffed belly.
Find the white lonely fingers
poised above a lake in midwinter
and all that dies in small rooms,
the earth realigning itself,
small beginnings of order.
Breathe in the mathematician’s crust,
the carefully measured sticks that prop up
mysterious buildings where
the hearts of reptiles are frozen.
Stand for the smallest part of a second
in the doorway where the rain
gathers fragrance from the herb garden,
where the longing for another world
strips you bare

While the after-tremor of this music
ripples, eddying around you,
only sit firmly as you play
and glance with the lightest nod of recognition
at all the wedding photographs,
the funeral notices.
Sitting upright concentrate
on the earth’s movement,
the invisible passage of light into dark
so that the exact measure of elegance be transmitted –
just enough for this moment
to outdistance pain.
Let the pause between notes
be brief yet long enough
to break however lightly
the gravity of falling through soundless space.

Posted in 01: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Postcards from the Bottom of the Well

Posted on July 1, 1997 by Mark O'Flynn

6

No water here where dust is thick
and even patented. Her lepidopterist’s
eyes quivering behind brambles of jewelry
like an aphrodisiac for the terminally
numb. She listens to the whimpers
of broken-necked birds and thinks
of Latin names pinned to specimen boards.
A horripilation of moths drink
the dried saliva from her lips;
her face the pallor of the drowned.
No pencilled message and no subtext.
Too stingy even to buy a stamp. Here
we have an accurate depiction
of weariness, the solid memory of cushions.


7

You hang on those salted beachside walls,
fading in all seasons’ weather, hovering
over the mute phone at the top of the stairs.
Your crossed eyes the only thing
retaining any colour, other than a bruised
suggestion at your throat. The pursed lips
like the diagonal strike of a pawn
within the circumference of your face.
But it is the eyes which bind,
always at the pinnacle, beyond
the reach of water, whom everybody hated
that lived there, their red intensity lost.
On my blind side, unnoticed, they have blended
chameleon-like into subsequent walls


8

At last the surface of water
is manifest, though it could be the sky.
Unseen mosquito larvae frenetic
in the shade of a bridge. Punctured
membranes of publicised dreams
litter the stillness and eventual peace.
A floating spider poised on the lake’s
meniscus. Reflections of willows
conjure quiet violence, mud settling
on the bottom, a school-bag filled
with stones, the ripples dissipating
after a swamp-hen has shrieked across
the dinner plates of water lilies
clattering into the reeds

Posted in 01: UNTHEMED | Tagged

The Lunar Lake

Posted on July 1, 1997 by Les Murray

The moon’s riddled Earth day
carried above black trees
puzzles birds into trilling,
makes beetles fly their cars.

The lake on the dark side
of that world is airless steel;
its dry plate never records
our brushstrokes of re-entry

but it’s patent to the mind
in its floodlit drink-quarries,
a crater-cast golden with dirt,
a Hubble lens of white settlers

Posted in 01: UNTHEMED | Tagged

The Cuan

Posted on July 1, 1997 by M T C Cronin

My grandfather’s father was born on the Cuan
My mother tells me as we drive

On the road from Merriwa to Scone
On the road thirty-five years ago

She rode to see my father
She rode a motorcycle then, an NSU

Down the dry creek beds and into his anger
Down the road from Scone to Merriwa

I imagine her at sixteen in the bush
I see from the car window

Following behind her older brother and his gun
Following the idea of rabbits behind every tree

And by eighteen she still had never shot one
And by five in the evening neither of them had

So Brian said “You’ll have to hit one with the car
So we’ve got something to take home for Tinny

For dinner”
For goodness sake she thought as she steered

Into the small streaking form, blinking
Into the late afternoon light burying itself

In many places
In the trees, the paddocks, the soft range

The animal thudded but wasn’t dead, shot into
The paddock with the boy in hot pursuit

While she sat in the car
While her hands sweated on the wheel she heard

Screaming filling its purple noise into the countryside
Screaming? No it stretched higher than that

It was her sitting in time made remarkable, she realised
It was the hare squealing

Somewhere she couldn’t see
Somewhere

An insane, imitating and forceless sound
An old sound, but bright and clear refusing

To turn
To live . . . or die

He came back to the car with it
He said “Took a fair whacking”

And she saw blood on his chin
And on the butt of the gun, with hair, she saw

Bits of hare on his chest and
Bits on the back of his hand

They drove and
They drove without talking

Past the Chinaman’s farm
Past Colonel Bath’s house where she’d gone one

Day for work experience, but she can’t to this
Day remember what she’d done there because

The boys had teased and teased her
The whole week before she’d had to go

Colonel Bath, they said, will give you orders
Colonel Bath will order you to give him a bath, she has

No idea, she says, shaking her head, and I have
No idea, really, what the Cuan is even

When I see a sign that says “Cuan”
When my mother sees it she points

“Pop’s father was born on the Cuan and
Pop’s father’s father, when he was sick

With cancer, went back to the bush and shot himself”
(With the quick thinking of ninety-two years …)

My mother is in the back seat with
My baby who has laughed herself to sleep

In the motel room, in the pub
In the church and in the Chinese Restaurant

And on this weekend away for a memorial service for her mother
And father, my mother talks to the old people and

At fifty-six looks beautiful and
At the church wears a beautiful blue-green dress

And on this weekend away my mother cries
And pays for everything

Posted in 01: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Narrative

Posted on July 1, 1997 by John Kinsella

Long-hauled in the hot zone
a road train tugs on the rightist strings
and precedent is damned like tokenism,
an outmoded supply strategy
that has them talking of extracting
organs from prisoners and sustaining life
to promote suffering, suspicion
the family value, a mystery prize
NO LONGER on the wheel of fortune, childcare
keeping the nuclear family mushrooming
like a bad joke in an ideal economy,
plays pleasantly unfolding to capacity
audiences who think they’re watching
a bloodsport, confirming
their eruption from malaise.
David Malouf says Australia
is an amazingly successful social
phenomenon, while that “weepy warbler”
Mariah Carey says when I watch TV
and see all those starving children
all over the world, it just makes
me want to cry. I mean, I’d like to be
as thin as that, but not with all those
flies and death and stuff and an
Aboriginal family is forced
into the baggage compartment
of the Indian Pacific at the request
of the “cleaner” passengers
and Manning Clark was seen to wear
the red ribbon of the Order of Lenin
and as such is posthumously elevated
to the ranks of Russian Spy. They
call this cutting the deficit,
cutting the fat from government.
It’s a jungle out there!
The twenty-dollar dame’s claim
to utopia as the regional declines
into nomadic wanderings. Now
we don’t need visas to tour
the nation of our becoming,
wheat subsidies and open markets
colluding on a test zone called Woomera
or Uruguay, war brides on the catwalk
and an increase in the military budget,
portraits of the Queen sneaking
into the national pie like additive codes.
Let us marvel at the national Panopticon,
let us consider the narrow coastal strip
turning like a pinwheel around The Rock,
Uluru, the tower of rapid eye movement
in the new parlance – explorer
stock laying claims to its spoils,
Ayers Rock the subtitle
of a new White Paper on immigration.
The kangaroos in the South West
are struck down by blindness:
crashing into wandoo and jarrah,
caught up in wire fences, mowed down
by tractors, drowning in dams. A turning point.
Seen it time and time again
old timers allegorically maintain. Speculation
inhabiting the virus-laden air
of Kangaroo Island, a semantic
sibilance as high winds strafe the gaping
spaces and those skies of deep blue
open hard though systematically
over the red sands while the market
watches with a hopeful eye –
doctors in Zaire report
a breakout on the Ebola River –
a georgic sucked dry of RNA.
Lobbying freedom the seven proteins
unbraid their complex plait, back in the kitchen,
neither dead nor alive, a filovirus
that takes a massacre to show
its presence. Frank Fenner,
hating small pox and rabbits,
fires a warning shot – ruptured
ecosystems release their viruses;
a survey line in the jarrah forests
moves a hundred metres when
no-one’s looking, a farmer covets
a dozen drums of DDT, threatening
to use them ’cause fifteen years ago
he paid good money, new viroids
sprouting from the paddock’s surface,
memory prompted by shifting fences.
A comparative analysis of candidate
strategies, the imposition of tariffs,
contours snaking through the Venn diagram
of shared usage, the eco-tourists
and land share liabilities glossed-up
in time for the election. Who says
for merriment this planet is not
well equipped? He needs to know he
exists. She knows already but her voice
is disguised electronically. A shift
in preferences results in the syndic’s
authority being strengthened; a
facsimile on curling paper
brings excitement to the editor’s
office: integration ends all racism!
A tightening of the English language
literacy standards for would-be immigrants.
A considerable body of militia
are hiding their weapons.
Quiddity is the word.
The roaded catchments
heaped rolled and compacted
ensure maximum run-off with little
precipitation, this national psyche
has been drought-proofed
and well promoted.

Posted in 01: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Wrapping the Hay

Posted on July 1, 1997 by John Kinsella

The hay has just been stacked
in neat yellow bricks like some complex
puzzle that needs to be solved.

The shed’s full, it sits alone out there
in the stark yellow paddock – pathetic edifice
waiting to be torched or blown away.

But it’s got Escher written all over it
so there’s a sense of the infinite.
Though early summer storms

can be pretty savage around here.
Lightning-struck trees along the roadsides
are testament to this. Dad reckons

we’d better get straight to it. Covering
the stack with blue plastic sheeting
and staking it deep in the ground.

But school’s just finished and next
year it’ll be university in the city.
Art history. But none of this landscape

stuff – give me Jeff Koons fucking
Cicciolina, those fleshy cybernauts
without a field or ear of wheat

in sight. So it’s hard to get motivated
and Dad tells me I’m not too big
for a clip under the ear. I wonder

if he’s joking but get out there
with my brothers and get stuck into it.
I tell them about Far from

The Madding Crowd and work up a sweat
thinking about Cicciolina. And how stylish
it would be to have a film version

with Koons instead of Alan Bates.
But keeping Julie Christie as
Bathsheba Everdene. Gross!

The blue plastic flaps viciously
as the wind lifts. It cracks in our faces.
It catches my youngest brother

and slices his cheek. The blood
spray-paints the hay. He keeps
at it, swearing at the top of his voice.

Lightning highlights the installation
and for a dreadfull moment
we seem to be furiously adrift

in the vast ocean of the paddock.
Over the Hills where the storm’s dark eye
dilates. The rain drives hard

and I forget about everything. Finally
the hay is wrapped. Christo appears
in my head and I keep him there.

Posted in 01: UNTHEMED | Tagged

Dear Les,

Posted on July 1, 1997 by Jennifer Compton 
     I think you ought to write a poem BUSH POET AT DEATH’S DOOR.
I wonder what death’s door looks like.
I’ve been there, in fact stepped through it – to be precise in an ambulance stopped at the red lights
next to Kilbirnie Post Office – but I don’t remember.
What I am sorry for is my mother heard them say – she’s gone – or – we’ve lost her.
Not nice for a mother to hear.
But I was really ready to go.
A history assignment on the Weimar Republic – you know how boring the Weimar Republic was and
probably still is.
For my kharma’s sake I spent years of my life writing a play about Hitler.
For give my excess – I am loosed on a tide of red wine and Van Morrison
POETIC CHAMPIONS COMPOSE.
He is a good guy Van .
I can forgive anything except bore dom .
Boredom kills.
Keep meaning to say to you phrase – everything was burnt up on re-entry – as if you were a star
or a piece of space junk falling back to earth.
Not quite slipped the surly bonds.
Remember what happened when Reagan quoted that?
the look on that mother and father’s face as they watched their daughter explode in space.
I saw a meteorite falling towards Bowral one night.
I ducked.
Much good that would do me.
I am so glad I hope you are as glad as I am that you are in postcode 2429.
Van is singing MOTHERLESS CHILD.
I didn’t bargain with God – I was quite firm about it.
Do what you will with him and send him back.
There was no shifting me on that point.
I’d rather you came to my funeral than I came to yours .
That’s what it always comes down to isn’t it?
Am I going to be holding Matt’s hand as he dies or is he going to be holding mine?
I’m just going to get another glass of wine.
Perhaps this is a poem.
I may slap it on the machine and press the save button.
POEM OF THANKSGIVING.
Now it is all going away because I am thinking of line length.
DRINK MORE PISS. TURN UP VAN.
Not people die but worlds die with them. (Yevtushenko excuse me that just slipped out.)
Neil said write a haiku for Les and this poem has only 17 syllables
but I don’t know which 17 are the ones that make kdang!
but you are alive and I don’t care if you have lost your net and can’t catch those poems any more
don’t care if you walk on your knees for the rest of your life search in the dust for grains of wheat
and those helicopters that you tried to wave away we re you in Vietnam or we re they giant blowies?
we re you still at DEATH’S DOOR what I can never be an Australian? no one will ever know why
you waved those helicopters away I heard you cough when they threw the phone down on the desk –
cough Mr Murray that’s right cough. You tried so hard to cough. You couldn’t. You couldn’t remember
how to cough up those helicopters. Then you remembered. You coughed from a very long way away.
And I cheered on the other end of the line
– good on yer Les cough up the feeding tube it’s all good pud from now on good pud!
Alive.
Miracle.
God is good.
What we truly want we can have.
Then we must let it live in the light of its own nature.
Or we kill it all over again.
I can’t believe how much I am raving on. This is all a letter you write and don’t send.
Because.
I wish everyone could sit in this room of mine and feel what I am feeling.
It feels something like bliss .
Can I publish this poem Les? Can I? Can I?
Sometimes I think the poems we write are only the thin shadows of what we think and feel.
The poems are like equations that can’t prove the word starved approximations of what we grip onto
it’s all that thinking about line length everything we hang onto and that hangs onto us is wordless
alive you’re alive and we nearly lost you but we hung on we hung on we hung on
I hope you are never sorry for this
is Australia just a very little like the Weimar republic? Just a little. Lotta guys doing things.
I can’t get out of this poem it is writing me I am glad for me I am glad for you
I am glad for the crowd at 2429 I am glad for the PRINT CULTURE
I’m like just glad all over glad all over me
alive alive alive not dead alive there you are the simple mind that lives in the body that lives
dear Les why did you frighten us what would I do if I could not find you if you abandoned us
MORE WINE
poetry does matter they all talk a lot of crap about poetry but it matters more than anything they say
POETRY like they hate what lives in the poets the thing that doesn’t live in them so they can’t know
what it is but they can hate it but we mustn’t let them oh dear Les I am down to one finger I have
lost the caps lock key CAPS LOCK KEY found it okay Les deal give us some more of those pomes
milch cow milch cow takes so long to find DEATH’S DOOR can’t leave it at that selfish selfish my
papa tried to write the poems 30 years tailing out and the nailing machine in THE BOX FACTORY
this machine is so much part of me as I type one finger I type words I type message I type meaning
two handed now coming in for the big finish and hope that I can get the rope around its wild head
when you gave yourself up to poetry you gave yourself up to us you might as well relax and enjoy
you have more personae than I have had hot dinners and we can call you a cab in the rain but no
one can do it for us like you can do it for us and if we quibble and squabble it’s just because just
because
well you know why
I can’t finsih I can’t finsih
misprint misprint
there is nothing like the mind of a poet purest manifestation of whatever
do it for my father who couldn’t write the poem he had to write
I do
do it because you can do it
do it because we’re waiting at the bus stop and we’re bored
tell us about the moment when you gave yourself up
didn’t belong to yourself any more but belonged to us
we’d really like to know about that
MORE WINE MORE WINE FINSIHED THE BOTTLE PLENTY MORE WHERE THAT 
     CAME FROM
come back to tell us
come back to tell us
I don’t think we can save him
well and we could and we’ve let plenty go you know we’ve let them go bright stars
so he’s gone and he’s gone etc.
but we dragged you back you owe us joy in the breath joy in the body like space dust that burns
in the sky over Bowral falling towards us if we are afraid forgive us live like we are afraid to
that’s what you promised us wasn’t it isn’t that what you promised us everything everything every
breath
let’s just forget you are a terrifyingly good poet
let’s just welcome you back into the tribe
find a place for you by the fire (next to my father)
there you are where you belong you belong to us
we belong to you it’s all just one big thing
Van Morrison sings the wine will never run out
fill the glass drink with no fear (next year?)
what can they do to us?
we who have died already.
Posted in 01: UNTHEMED | Tagged