Read The Best Australian Poems 2011 Online
Authors: John Tranter
Tags: #The Best Australian Poems 2011, #Black Inc., #John Tranter, #9781921870453
I dream the films I'll never make.
They have misty titles like
âBoy at a Window', âShadow of a Dog',
âOdalisque/Oblique'. They would play
short seasons in empty cinemas.
âSelf Portraits' consists of fake after fake.
âYoung Loves or the Fang of Time'
is shot with persistent, nostalgic lust
in black and white and blurs of poppy.
âSouth Coast Trilogy' has the distant haze
of over-exposure, of things long lost
that no longer matter, except to me â
flying sometimes, crawling sometimes,
from too much memory.
buy some strong alcohol at changi
but don't drink it
Â
attractive face pileup
Â
each feature a harbinger
it's eyes that wear uniforms
Â
pinching those witnesses
from the picture
Â
âwhat colour do you call that'
Â
/
Â
that's what my eyes call it
In Sydney,
our absence is visible.
Â
Most cities just fall away,
like a tale out of steam.
Â
But Sydney abrupts to a light-cave:
a cavern of leaf-scrawls and glare.
Â
High up, you get to subsume it: your
outlook
.
Â
But down there and in it,
you hack through a bright lack of interest;
a steep disregard for potential, or goodness, or mood.
Â
Mostly, we like to believe
there's a shore for each utterance.
Â
But you can't always reach one. Not here.
Â
Where the bush can pop up almost anywhere â¦
Â
It is why we're so smiley. And doubtful. And vaguely bereft.
Â
No point in getting upset if there's nobody there.
Â
And they're pretty as this.
Two x-rays of spotted quolls
flutter-slip into a wafer of sunlight in a clearing
where a National Parks ranger
pins the boned celluloid
to a viewing table of lit, woven grass
then stands back to assess the inner, carnivorous life.
She removes her greater glider mask
and the hairclip she's fashioned
from coral tree thorns.
There is blood on her wrist.
Under her gathered hair
her neck is redolent of an embrace
whose details are still alive in her
after thirty years.
The x-rays blow away
with a sound all transparencies make
when no longer useful.
A stopped cloud turns the scene
into a waiting room on a farm
inside the head of the husband
of a bipolar ranger.
Let it rain, darling, he says, with the kind of understanding
you sometimes find
in the eyes of wild animals, at close range
and it does rain, and for a very long time.
Unlicensed I drive along roads I know well,
in the same year
a widower and great-grandfather.
At dusk my mind takes a short walk
and visits
the burial place on a hill.
Â
With the cattle gone
the land is coming back,
the ruined acres are restored.
Birds I've not seen for years
and perennial native grasses
are plentiful again,
and some interloper crimson roses
among blue wattle foliage and red clay
and dogs â my pet wolves â barking through chicken wire
are wet with the evening dew
of doing nothing.
Â
We stood as a gramophone cranked out
âGod Save the King'
then sat on a blanket and watched giant shapes
flicker on a sheet that billowed in the night.
Â
My kin wore wide-brimmed felt hats.
We believed ourselves royalists
but acted like republicans.
We were pink Anglo-Celts who drove
a scattering of dark-skinned tribes from their titles.
We killed as they killed,
and the dead can't apologise.
Â
I drink stolen water
and taste no contamination.
I conserve seeds and flowers and names.
But the world is not a museum â we are not curators.
The ballad's afterglow
is consumed by the future.
i am Lew Welch hurrying
into the hills, vapid fumes of hope streaming behind me;
the entrails of an animal thought extinct.
Â
the gun stashed
(not even my friends know i like guns. well they do now.),
but uncomfortable against my skinny ribs, elementally exposed.
Â
rap rap rapid words
bubbling so furiously you could ride them
to the mountain top, if such a thing. you know.
Â
And this damn gun.
Â
the stars blinking on, the day slinking off.
the night welcoming; the salt earth
beckoning my tired bones and feet that
move independently as does that lizard's eyes.
i forget which. i forget which.
Â
After all, this is just a story.
Â
i am the silence hurrying
down the barrel, down the goat track.
i can't get there fast enough. (what
does it mean to disappear? tell me
Â
that.)
the place i'll know or it will know; a
mutual concurrence of exhaustion,
singing like cooling rocks and beasts under the clear eyes of desert.
Â
the names of these slopes and valleys
an unrequited love. (dimming now but methinks
that's just the light.) musical and terrifying. as if San Fran or Chicago never existed.
and why i took it or why it took me
as mysterious as the word
âposthumous'.
Â
And then there's this thing the gun wants; an irrefutable quiet.
Â
as if Lew Welch never existed.
When I say that history was my favourite
I'm thinking less of the Weimar Republic
or the militarisation of Japan
than Miss R's contralto discipline
and her homemade Chanel suits.
Â
For her I spend my afternoons
between the light blue covers
of the Cambridge History of England.
Pendant mes vacances
my special project is Eleanora Duse.
Â
When she asks if she can keep it
I am nonchalant as hell.
It is not the delicate detail, for the cast is too crude
for that: this girl's face obliterated by weeping plaster,
Â
a man's extremities reduced to rounded stumps. It is
the large arrested gesture that tells these bodies, saying:
Â
So this is the shape of death
. Familiar lovers fastened
on a stone bed (whereas life might have ripped them apart),
Â
a dog's high-pitched contortion, an entire family sleeping,
the baby rolled absently from its mother.
Â
Unburied, they weigh more than bone ever could.
They have shaken off the ash and refuse to rest. So many
Â
stopped limbs. Mouth holes, eye holes, a balled fist.
But in the end, this is what halts you: how a young woman sits
Â
with her knees drawn up to her chest, hands covering eyes.
How a child's body folds, alone at the final moment â
Â
and a man rises from his bed, as if waking for the first time.
It's 5.30 a.m.
God and I stand
on the verandah.
I'm surprised to see
him smoking a pipe.
âI don't do the drawback,'
he says. His corduroy trousers
are the colour of wheat-stubble
and the deep pockets of his moss-green
cardigan exude an earthy smell.
His voice seems to rise
out of his pipe-smoke
as he asks how I like the morning.
I tell him that the rosy glow
hovering on the horizon
reminds me of the liquor
I got when I poached
the white peaches last summer.
He sucks on his pipe and nods.
âWhat are you on about?' I ask.
He stares at the limpid sky.
The pipe gently ignites.
A puff of smoke ascends
and becomes a cumulonimbus.
âLooks like rain,' he says.
âYou'd better go in.'
I speak of love in one pan; love for potatoes
love in a tablet, love and debts or sermons.
I mistook pleasure-giving for a seedtext â
two cowboys and a pickaxe â sheepdogs
nudging ewes for a droplet. Needleworking
guts as a cat lopes, a cat disappears like a dumb seed
nosing into the folds of a sheep's fleece. A cat
is in love, in love with Russia, with minerals and
rivers. The way we love borders. The way we
learned to love physics, the way we used to
love globalisation. THE WAY WE LOVE
TECHNOLOGY! Loving difference or Buddhism.
Pornographic or scatological loves at odds with
chance. Love so slovenly, so clumsy. I love it and
I tell it. I abandoned illiteracy as untrustworthy.
Sew up the sheep's neck with stitches where it
was bitten by an overachieving dog, you will find
that the neck tastes as catnip, a zone for loose and
metallic thinking, stretched out, guts airing.
Someone's gonna read this, this love like police presence.
And voices come over the back fences, and the
phttt phttt phttt
of the sprinkler throwing out streamers of crystals
past the bleached wooden posts
into the shadows
on the cracked path of the laneway.
The shadows are from the trees in the backyards
â there are no trees in the lane â
only tufts of grass between the cracks
and here and there, a yellow daisy
in the windless half-light. If you stretch your neck
you can just see the lucky people in the backyards.
They laugh in the sunlight, the wind lifts their hair,
their clothes are bright squares of colour.
But the ache in your neck means
you cannot strain for long; you drop back
to the hot dirt and look through the shadows
to where the lane rises into a darkness you've never noticed.
You walk past the yards, past entire lives lived
while you were sleeping, toward the slow murmur of the others
at the end of the laneway. But everyone who matters
is further ahead or hasn't arrived. And you wonder,
Was all that writing about the dead a game? As the last crystal drop
disappears without a trace in the dirt at your feet, was it real
or was it a dream?
Â
You wonder, Is the dirt at your feet real? The last crystal drop
disappearing without a trace must be a dream. Maybe
while you were sleeping, everyone who mattered
arrived and went further ahead.
If you walk past the slow murmur from the backyards,
you will surely find the others at the end of the laneway
beyond the rise where the shadows drop into darkness.
You cannot be bothered straining to look into the lives
of the people in their hot backyards: many will be sleeping. Why
stretch your luck when the world here has so many bright squares
of colour: tufts of grass, a yellow daisy. It is odd
the way the dappled shadows shift across the cracks:
there are no trees in the lane.
The windless half-light lies down
on the cracked path. And the stream of pale crystals that wet
the bleached wood posts are unstrung in the laneway. They fall
and are still as the sprinkler goes
phttt ⦠pht ⦠tt ⦠ph ⦠t ⦠t
and the voices over the back fences stop.
The hills arrived and I kept driving.
With every civic car park this theory
Of joint tenancy grew more abstract.
There were shared passwords
And beds unmade with abandon,
But I didn't want to ruin
Our argument with the past.
Citing roadkill would be callow
So I sent back cards
Left blank for your thoughts.
I counted ructions
And the miles between them.
Where the road withered
Lay a Switzerland of the heart.
Everything is ominous.
â
Another ordered loneliness.
â
The future is fatal.
â
Even the open field, a labyrinth.
â
The afternoon idly flicks through the pages of itself.
â
A list of names: good news, or bad?
â
The long silence of rooms.
â
History with its morphine headache.
â
The anonymous rain falling on motels.
â
The atrocities played under flickering streetlights.
â
The cars parked under melodramatic weather.
â
Finally, every future is fatal.