29 Dec 2009

The border loss -- Jennifer Maiden

[1949–current, Australian]

    Experience
depresses, discolours his vision.
Rainlight depresses the room,
the fire, snug as fantasy,
imperative to sanity this time.

I say, “They say in danger one’s
instincts are always wrong.” “Not if
you’ve perverted your instructs as long
as I have,” he responds. I study
his auden-face, destroyed
by reason’s pits and lines.

So highly strung, so debonair,
the violin confiding her
meditative scandals to
his yielding concentration.

“Intellect being mostly the
knack of half-recovery –
recuperation? – so the stupid
do hurt themselves more
& aggress more
in love, not knowing why”

all taut resistance in the voice, the face
deceiving by its bookish
reassurance, & the voice
as angry as an alcoholic sigh.

    Politic
on the candlesticks entwine
smug cherubim & mighty in
all their dainty pudgy
little powers, reflecting some
harmless breathless insouciant
truculence in his charm.
He builds skilfully, times
it to topple, but so slowly

“There were elaborate warranties
built into her hints
& spontaneities. I always
seemed to agree more formally
than seemed to be required.”

    Disarmed,
I’m slammed into his voice, I feel
its night-rattle, a lorry
to buck & bruise slow missions through the storm.

    I offer
“I thought that one was inter-
resting. That one almost won.”

Always he loses, needing
always to more than answer,
always to fulfil.
“The need makes me debauch,
make ritual,
make safe. When young
I’d a simple cruel urge to destroy
the destructive & to be,” his tone
seductive as a reaction, but
using his breath to tame
a grieving constriction in his lungs.

Womanless, the room suggests
muskily migraine & tampons &
mild pleasure mild duty mild martyrdom.

Source: Maiden, J 1979, The Border Loss, Angus and Robertson Publishers.

Port Melbourne, 5am -- Tim Metcalf

[Australian]

The sky
through these two windows
an eggshell blue.

Outside
the birds chip away
at the night,

and I,
as cuckoo-man,
prepare to leave

this nest.
Day cracks open,
harsh light soars in. 

Source: Porter, D & Millett, J (eds) 1989, ‘On Struggle Street – An Anthology of New Poets’, Poetry Australia 122, South Head Press, Port Melbourne.

28 Dec 2009

On the town with love -- Penelope Layland

[Australian]

Don’t want to know if we will
never again stay, hours as vapour,
walking out later into surprising dawn.
High shoes in hand and the
night’s city sordidness printing
my feet. You with the grey pallor
of alcohol, scalp crawling light,
a dingy glow in the bend of your neck.
It’s a long way home and the city wakes:
orange billows on filthy glass, greasy
water on warming concrete, the nausea of no-sleep.
We’ve had so much more than they’ll
ever know – the night and then all of this.
Don’t want to know we will never go home,
to sleep in the jackhammer dawn.

Source: Porter, D & Millett, J (eds) 1989, ‘On Struggle Street – An Anthology of New Poets’, Poetry Australia 122, South Head Press, Port Melbourne.

The Pleasure of this Dance -- Jonathan Nicholls

[1956–current, English]

If you want to take my hand,
cover the arcs and stripes of my lifelines
with your own,
don’t ask me
to do
the military two.

I don’t want to shuffle
like a well behaved pedestrian
to the right
to the left
to the right again
turn and direct
a mortal kick.

I don’t want to be bound up
by neat routines
done before
done again;
boxed in,
a product;
a man on a factory floor,
eye on the clock
waiting for the clamour to stop.

If you want to take my hand
for the pleasure of this dance
then come with me
down
the bent and narrow.

******

I want to dance
like a mother weeps at the birth of her child
like she wails if that child goes to an early grave.

I want to dance
like kindling burns
like hot fat spits onto unsuspecting skin
    like a bruise
        like a deep wound bleeds

I want to dance
like a chick beats its way out of a shell
    like that same chick – a hen – decapitated
    chased death round the yard.

I want to dance
like fireworks appear
like a tree in a storm
like the ocean’s appetite.

I want to dance
like a lunatic whispers
like a rumour of war
like a condemned man’s last request

I want to dance
like a child plays on its own
like a bird flies freed from a cage
like a dolphin,
    like a shark,
        like a whale.

I want to dance
like a virgin dreams of being loved
like a man shakes as he comes
like a hymen splits.

I want to dance
like a bullet’s sleep is broken
like a drowning man comes up for air
like the dogs of Pompeii are sleeping

I want to dance
even as the dance floor empties,
even when the music stops.
And with or without you
I’m going to dance.

Source: Porter, D & Millett, J (eds) 1989, ‘On Struggle Street – An Anthology of New Poets’, Poetry Australia 122, South Head Press, Port Melbourne.

Excerpt from 'The colour of blood' -- Yvette Christianse

[1954–current, born South Africa, migrated to Australia]

For days, because there is no rain,
the blood is there.
Where no-one looks I go and stare
and that’s in me too,
how it changes colour
and goes deeper into itself
like fear or shame,
retreating, retreating.
And there are bright snails
munching young leaves
in my stomach.

Source: Porter, D & Millett, J (eds) 1989, ‘On Struggle Street – An Anthology of New Poets’, Poetry Australia 122, South Head Press, Port Melbourne.

On Struggle Street -- Terese Davis

[1961–current, Australian]

Every house
is painted in dockyard grey
cracked
in the emphysemic smoke
of B.H.P.’s wasting industry.

A foreclosure notice
stuffed in the letter box
warrants
a for-sale sign
pitched in the front yard –
a feeble crucifix
it marks the grave
of a steel worker’s collapsing dream.

Priced to include
a fence that cannot keep faith within
and a lawn
scarred beyond believing.
No. You would not choose to live on this street.
But another worker
will tie themselves in a mortgage knot
and spend their life to buy
a hopeless piece of struggle street.

Source: Porter, D & Millett, J (eds) 1989, ‘On Struggle Street – An Anthology of New Poets’, Poetry Australia 122, South Head Press, Port Melbourne.

Doris -- Miriam Loftus

you’ve let yourself go
you old cow
he said once too often –
and so she did
pack the suitcase
load the handbag
she did
let herself go.

Source: Porter, D & Millett, J (eds) 1989, ‘On Struggle Street – An Anthology of New Poets’, Poetry Australia 122, South Head Press, Port Melbourne.

Holding hands -- Terese Davis

[1961–current, Australian]

Taking me home
tearing
back down the Pacific Highway
you decided on a romantic gesture –
you drove us off the edge.
A driven man you said
and snatched at my trembling hands.
Holding them
tight as a first prize
you cried that you missed these hands.

These hands
shaking from post-operative nausea
are the same hands
that held our screaming baby girl
smoothing away
all her night’s anxieties
with a patting
drummed-out in fevered darkness
until
it seemed these hands were dead
and my bleeding would not stop.

While your unfaithful hands
were conspiring with you in another city
squeezing the life
from another woman
a casualty doctor’s hands
were washed
as he prepared to rescue me
from this botched abortion. My hands
frozen to the sides of the operating table –
two fists of fear.

You were not there
to unclench my stinging fingertips.
You
know nothing of these hands.

Source: Porter, D & Millett, J (eds) 1989, ‘On Struggle Street – An Anthology of New Poets’, Poetry Australia 122, South Head Press, Port Melbourne.