Hawke for Hawke

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Graham Rowlands

Hawke’s grandparents for Hawke. Hawke’s parents for Hawke.
Hawke’s special relationship with Hawke’s mother (for Hawke).
Hawke’s special relationship with Hawke’s father (for Hawke)
& Hawke’s father’s special relationship with God (for Hawke).
MY WORD MY WORDS: THE COLLECTED SPEECHES OF A THREE YEAR OLD—
Hawke’s special offer of his picture book to any purchaser of
ten or more copies of THE HAWKE MEMOIRS all signed by R J Hawke.
Hawke’s scholarships & Hawke’s Rhodes Scholarship for Hawke &
now the Robert James Lee Hawke Open Scholarship (for Hawke).
Hawke’s drinking. Hawke’s drinking records. Hawke’s drinking
to anyone who’ll drink to Hawke. Cheers. Bottoms up. To A A.
Hawke as advocate for Hawke & the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
Then Hawke as President of the ACTU for the ACTU (& for R J Hawke).
Hawke’s affairs that would have remained only Hawke’s affair
if Hawke hadn’t cried about them in prime time to win votes.
Bill Hayden as Minister for Foreign Affairs & Governor General—
quite literally Bill Hayden for Bob Hawke as Prime Minister.
Concensus for Hawke. Hawke at the centre of his own concensus.
Hawke’s special relationship with perms & hairdressers (& mirrors)
& cricketers & yachtsmen & golfers & punters & tycoons (& mirrors).
Hawke’s special (if not unique) relationship with dinkum Aussies &
his own signature & autograph books of all shapes & sizes (for Hawke).
Hawke’s special international relationship with The Greater Israel
with Lebanon, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights &
with Hawke’s & Bush’s U S of A & Hawke’s & Gorby’s old U S S of R
& Hawke’s very very special relationship with none other than Hawke
in full frontal crying over Chinese tanks pulping Hawke’s Chinese
as Hawke would cry over spilt memoirs hawked, remaindered & pulped—
Hawke morally outraged & Greatly moved by the morally outrageous &
working himself up into a frenzy of rhetorical snot trailing down
like the Red Flag hanging limp over the last of the Red Flags—
that rendezvous with History if not with Destiny for Hawke
& The Silver Bodgie & Old Silver & old R J if not J C Hawke
old (Bob for no jobs) Robert James Lee Hawke (for Hawke).

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

The Lemons of Lands End

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Adam Aitken

It was worth it, forty pence
for the Cornish Express.
(the broadsheet, not the bus) in a grocer shop
Lands End way.
And the wait, so long; for the bus
would never come they said,
no one here had seen it.
A ghost in the drizzle machine.
We gypsied on through fog
that kept us hypothermic,
but did not listen, and sung
that name, Lands End
which drew us on, what we headed for.
Unknown residue of North Atlantic light
not far from here. As west as you could go.

Meanwhile we’d wait, get dry, that sour shopkeeper’s
rather-sell-you-nothing face
not big on trust; but did relent, and sold us
what we never knew we missed –
lemons, half a pound; the acid
scurvy cure: citrus six pack,
imports in a battered mildewed box
going nowhere else,
thick and bubbly skinned
desiccated by iridescent spore,
coral bloom behind a stack of Daily Telegraphs.
Warming in our hands.
What they were
what they had always been, sweeter
than they looked.

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

Serial Numbers

Posted on July 1, 1998 by John Tranter

And tell the truth – the tumult of various expendable
business plans, and the evening blinked in like a landing jet,
apparently graceful, in fact screaming nuts and bolts –
shaking metal plus desire equals travel industry bond
finance downturn explains his desperation –
he never got over the way his father hated him,
and shook a fist at himself in the mirror, rushing out
to join his pals at a gathering, cheese and wine
and social exchanges a whirling confetti – for a moment
the pack of snarling gibbons recognised something simian
about the crowd at the poetry reading, their embraces
heartfelt yet somehow insincere – talent
given muscle by a bicycle pump, show biz
slang and chatter bouncing off the plexiglass –
model twaddle, chop throttle, sling hash and babble –
there – I don’t remember a thin Singaporean
speaking gently into the handset about the banking
teletype network linking the island republic
to a pit of treasury dread in Yokohama – banknote
suction whirlwind – the old investment managers
fuck up due to lack of basic training in futures hedge
management – chattering over the sherry in between
profit and loss is not the safety rope,
he’d chosen to be an alcoholic, heavily crinkled,
a choice made up of thousands of little weaknesses
day by day, wearing down the rock of his self-esteem.
The young professors traded gossip and influences
– I had lunch with Mister Hartford – oh, really? – just
lunch? – like kids with cigarette cards and pictures of Batman
when they should be practising their knots and lanyards.
Now the secret no one talks about – lack of talent.
You see? Dead quiet. Her cow-lick was a flexible
bang, while the quay water alfresco wavelets
wobbled through those long railing antlers, bracket,
I mean, slicing up the light into vertical samples,
each related to the one parallel, drawing energy
from each other, a team of singing brothers –
one dollar smells like its sibling in the wallet – print,
print – there’s a ferry wandering and churning the surface
now sprinkled with rain. The thunder there
was hypnotised – widespread, miniature, far ranging –
flattering the city with dreams of a distant time
when everything was hunky-dory and a hamburger
was something to get excited about. Not the saxophone,
not the forgotten instruments, the cowbells
across the evening pastures, shit on the boots,
or the dew like crystal points on the morning radio
news traffic report not needed here, no traffic,
nothing happens in this town that God don’t
know about – he’s dreaming it, and we’re Him.

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

Somniloquy

Posted on July 1, 1998 by Andrew Zawacki

This is how I know: because summer kept escaping
from the wine, and people were left behind
with no explanation; because it’s hours

until the paperboy leaves, or the beekeeper
wakes from his dreams of a beekeeper waking
to clean out the combs; because wind spent the night

in all the great houses, turning the corner onto familiar
streets; because a neighbor watered her lawn so someone
could look for someone else, and lose again; because waves

and nothing to stop them; because of unwritten letters;
because windows where light got trapped for a moment
and was overheard past midnight, promising you.

Posted in 03: NEXT WAVE | Tagged

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