Tuesday Poem - 'Walking Around at Night' by Robert Gray

Walking Around at Night

The rising moon appears,

softly focused as a movie queen,

in a close frame

through the kitchen flyscreen.

I stroll outside and down the path,

leaving a radio;

the moon is buxom

behind the curtains of the willow.

It's soon an old fumy paraffin lamp

of a moon, lifted clear.

The hammer blows of barking,

a car clearing its chest, somewhere,

the slam of a tinny garage door

on concrete, and the voices

going inside that could be either

quarrelsome or boisterous.

In that dim-lit town, gable houses

wear a net veil

of leaf-shadow. The lawns, side-lit,

are wheatgrass, succulent and frail.

A parking lot is bare tonight

within its cold, immense

chain-wire. The shadows of some pebbles

loom like a chess defence.

A single tree on the Council lawn,

in 'subdued light', is still:

dressed up, a woman alone in the corridor

of a convention hotel;

a skinny tree, in knee-length fashion, and

leg-aligning, high-heel pose.

A little nervous and preening, tottery.

Another one of those.

Across the paddocks, backyards —

Above fences, the lounge room lights burn;

in the frosty night, thick like thistle fur,

a few porch lights are on.

I keep walking. A cow and the moon

(it's white as salt now), each a term

in some kind of sequence, I shoo

the cow, for a place to lie that's warm,

under a lichen-smoke and bird's egg sky.

Adrift on the rising night.

Going on, towards a razor-strop highway;

its streaks of light

are suddenly lifted away at the curve

and gone, each a stroke;

and the occasional heavy flat backwards

stropping, of a truck.

Waiting to cross (a short-cut back), I stand

in weeds. At every car,

they're strung with glutinous, distended drops.

The moon is bright as an old scar.

Well, 'Cumulus', Robert Gray's Collected Poems, is certainly a book and a half.

I've been through it twice, with a break of almost a year between first and second

reading, and now I am shelving it, but I couldn't say I've got on top of it. It's very

rich feeding, indeed. The star poems are for me for the nonce – 'In Departing Light'

and 'A Bowl of Pears' – (both from 'Afterimages' 2002) – but every time I turned a

page to focus on another poem (sometimes at random and out of sequence) I seemed

to be caught up in a whole new definition of starriness. Look, I liked damn near the

whole book (tiny bit tough on Thomas Hardy maybe on page 239??) The whole book

took my fancy. So which poem to pick?? I went for this one, because I have taken that

walk many times, many times, in many little towns, and this poem is the absolute

experience of that walk. As I was typing the poem up I was totally relishing the acute

play of the punctuation, and then I noticed the delicious rhymes!

http://johnleonardpress.com/?p=186

Tuesday Poem - 'Interruptions to Reading Poetry' by Jean Kent

Interruptions to Reading Poetry

1. In the Middle of David Malouf's Wild Lemons

I put down the poetry book and walk out

the front door. On the brick path, like a visitor

hesitating before broaching the house steps:

a small, slate-black rat.

It is shivering, poisoned, not-quite

dead. Its pointed ears

pick up my footsteps, but

barely. Its coat rises round it like a fur

around the neck of an opera-goer stepping out

into silence, each glittering dark fibre

still electric, still charged,

deep to every nerve. It is in the middle

of my path to anywhere — as precisely final

as a print from Dürer, perfect in every tiny

detail of ear point, bony paw, fishing line-fine

whiskers hooked

in an elegant, still nose. It is in the middle

of what I am carrying out of the house from my book —

wild lemons, a place in Tuscany, the body receiving

transfigured text …

                              Under a sky of singing blue

it is in the middle of its death

and will not

be transfigured. The flat world of a shovel

is what I bring it. Banged head. Final act.

When it rolls on the bricks it has the profile,

soft torso and premature paws

of an ultrasound embryo.

                                   At this moment when it should be

hard as stone, flung out of the world, instead it is so limp

and the day is stiffening around it.

I balance it on my spade

towards a last rest, a quick

                        sharp grave

under hydrangeas' already bowed

                         lapis-lazuli heads

and the noisy miner birds

which all day have been rehearsing

unholy choruses

hold their breath.

                        Under the hot rattle

of loquat leaves, their silence follows me

like the weight

of a just-closed book.

2. Somewhere in Charles Wright's A Short History of the Shadow

That petulant bird, the phone, warbles in another room.

Where I am sitting, sun has just sparked —

even though the sky outside is sulking.

Dark ranges at the edge of my view

are lugubrious dinosaurs, waiting to gobble what's left

of last night's moon —

and now here's this chain of song, its couplings tossed towards me.

I go like a dog to be collared.

Some dark man with his thumb on my name

wants to offer me pest control, as if he knows there are rats

slinking along the branches of my trees at night,

sly shadows whose teeth gnaw holes in everything at 3 a.m.

He hangs up even before I do …

My voice in its glove of politeness

must hold a bait of slowed time, some dangerous sweetness

I caught in my last moments alone in the poem —

                                                        but which poem?

and where in the book can I find it now? The black matt cover,

its edges scuffed, its sleek centre streaked,

has collapsed. Like an unpolished shoe

                                         it shows no sign of the white foot

                                         which lived in it two minutes ago.

The downward sloping leaves

                                         of pittosporums and loquats shiver

like the ears of sleeping dogs an arm's length from my chair —

sun ruffles the morning's dreaming fur …

                                                         
                                                          and the book,

                                 no matter where I open it —

                      the book

slides out of its fretful slipper —

                                it walks out into the dawn again

its ankles and its insteps so painfully white, its black

lines like veins

                      rising knobbled and tender toward

                                                          'the music of things'

while a gnawed moon

slides into grey mountains to grow again.

I couldn't help but agree with the blurb by Paul Summers on the inside

front cover of the hour of silvered mullet – that Jean Kent's poetry was

like 'an argument with the air'. It is a slippery, silvery sort of book. I

was at a loss, as I read, as to how to put my finger on its qualities. But

then, as its qualities invaded me, I minded less about pinning things

down, and began to let my mind float about here and there, in a most

particular intimacy with the drift and lift of its musicality.

http://pittstreetpoetry.com/emporium/jean-kent/

Tuesday Poem - 'The Mitchells' by Les Murray

THE MITCHELLS

I am seeing this: two men are sitting on a pole

they have dug a hole for and will, after dinner, raise

I think for wires. Water boils in a prune tin.

Bees hum their shift in unthinning mists of white

bursaria blossom, under the noon of wattles.

The men eat big meat sandwiches out of a styrofoam

box with a handle. One was overheard saying:

drought that year. Yes. Like trying to farm the road.

The first man, if asked, would say I'm one of the Mitchells.

The other would gaze for a while, dried leaves in his palm,

and looking up, with pain and subtle amusement,

say I'm one of the Mitchells. Of the pair, one has been rich

but never stopped wearing his oil-stained felt hat.

      Nearly everything

they say is ritual. Sometimes the scene is an avenue.

I invested in a copy of 'The Best 100 Poems Of Les Murray' (Black Inc)

because I was curious to see which ones he had picked. I didn't always

agree with him, I thought he had left out some corkers. (Aphrodite Street,

for instance). But I agreed with him about this one, it has to be in my top ten.

http://www.blackincbooks.com/books/best-100-poems-les-murray

Tuesday Poem - 'The afterlife of elephants' by Lynn Davidson

The afterlife of elephants

Here is the elephant at the bank

idly stirring up dust,

idly touching your shoulder.

Here is the elephant

thundering along the concrete expressway

on four unbending feet.

Here is the elephant hanging

from a whisky bottle, which is what happens

when you take him for a Grant's.

Here is the elephant with his landscape body -

those distant terraces up close reveal themselves

as ragged gouges from the rainy season.

Or perhaps it is inside the elephant

where the articulation of water occurs. Which is all

for the good. He is heating up as he gets older.

*

Here is the elephant

we have come far to see. Silk ripples

from the great wall of his spine.

Here is the elephant

to teach you about rhythm.

Watch the silk, it is rhythm's after-image.

If I were to write the deepest thing

inside me it would be this

elephant sound.

His eyes are so elephant

when he looks at me while

hooking up hay and feeding it into his mouth.

I try for detached

but really, I wish I could throw a beaded shawl

of water so delicately across my back.

*

The elephant is on his way, quick

open the window before he gets here

while there is still room for elbows and hinges.

Here is the elephant

breaking the spine of Contemporary Scottish Poetry.

There's nothing about bagpipes in there, elephant.

Did the elephant have to come

to the story-telling centre? I point to a busker

outside, playing flamenco on a uke. He ignores the bait.

So. Here is the elephant.

See how his heavy trunk droops, forgotten,

as he stares and stares at the mysterious paper sculptures.

The elephant does not know that he is also swaying

and people are stumbling back.

The elephant thinks he is standing still.

Here is the elephant.

There is no need for cats to give loneliness form,

because here is the elephant.

Every so often I meet up with Lynn Davidson, and sometimes it is in

Wellington, and sometimes it is in Melbourne. I can never be quite sure

when and where I will spot her. I think she is a bit of thistledown that

drifts to and fro, following the winds of her own purposes. Or something

very like that. Last time we met she popped up at Vincent O'Sullivan's

launch in Wellington. Just like that. There she was. But I wasn't very

surprised. For her to pop up, I have to pop up too. She was the Visiting

Literary Artist following on from me at the flat in the Square Edge in

Palmerston North, and although we exchanged emails we hadn't met

then. All this bumping into each other started happening after that.

And I was well pleased to bump into this poem in the latest Australian

Poetry Journal, because – well – I like it a lot. But as I started to type

it up I got quite a frisson as I realised it wasn't exactly about what it 

purported to be about. It's a real shape-shifter of a poem, deep down. 

But with an airy, insouciant surface. Nice!

Tuesday Poem - 'The detective's chair' by Anne M. Carson

The detective's chair

threadbare, stained with old Guinness, splashes of double malt.

Rebus sits into the early hours pooled in moonlight, neon,

dappled with despair, ensconced in smelly, smoky fug.

He looks unseeing over night-time Edinburgh, shoos ghosts

back into the past, ignores conflicts with the brass, other cops,

even manages to bypass self-recrimination, regret, that

quagmire of his multiple failings. He comes to the centre

of concern, the current case. He may not be quite sober but

the blur is better. You can't bludgeon hunches out of hiding,

have to be willing to hang out in their vicinity, hope they

show their heads. He sinks another inch or two of whisky,

the better to see into the shadows, last the night through.

He nods off, as usual, the LP crackling as it spins, still

seeking the glimmer of clues nestled between hard facts.

Erlundur comes home after a brittle day. Nothing has broken

open in the case of the murdered boy, no motive, weapon

not even a maybe suspect to pin their hopes upon. His chair

sits by the window, blond wood waiting to welcome him.

He leaves the light off, sinks into low-slung, leather-

upholstered ease, letting his mind loose from its leash. He

offers his tired thoughts, his despair to the open sky. They

dissolve in its infinite space. His ghosts visit him – unsettling

spectres from the past. He sighs, allows them their due. Gone

midnight, Reykjavik. He always means to get up, go to bed,

but dawn often finds him curled into the contours of the chair,

cold, cramped. He goes over the facts one more time, teases

them apart to see what can be glimpsed through the cracks.

Wallander jerks awake, heart jumping. He's on the sofa again

grabbing a few hours, still surrounded by dirty laundry. Not time

enough this case for a leisurely chair by the window, letting

patterns emerge, even Puccini is relegated to a back seat.

This time its a serial killer. He snatches thinking-space

between developments on a bleached beach at Malmö Harbour,

Copenhagen smudged in a haze across the Sound. Or shut-eyed,

slumped on vinyl in his Volvo at the Ystad crime scene. Even

flat on his back in a locked conference room, desperate for

a few motionless moments to let his thoughts roam unfettered.

A niggle, just out of reach, an uneasy ache he knows holds

vital clues. Something someone said or didn't say; elusive

since the first murder. If only he could sit and listen long

enough for it to unfurl, it could crack the case wide open.

This poem really sparked with me, ever since Anne tabled an early draft at our
workshop. It's not just because, I think, I hope, that  I am a huge fan of detective
fiction, although I am, but also because I was so energised by the way Anne infers
that the writing of a poem, usually with a bum in a chair, has intimate parallels with
the parading of clues through a nerveless mind. So the premise of the poem
caught my attention, and then there's the way Anne handles it so deftly. It's a
lovely triptych of technical and artistic delights.

http://cordite.org.au/reviews/sharkey-carson/

http://annemcarson.com/poetry/

http://hybridpublishers.com.au/index.php/poetry/removing-the-kimono.html

Tuesday Poem - 'Skyshow' by Toby Davidson

 Skyshow

Fireworks now and fire worked then, as long as it sparkles

we'll claim Bethlehem. Bottled sparkle, served on buildings

rains forty stories down on mounted police as they baton-charge

youths, including at least three Darrens I saw tearing each other

to garn fuggun gah-un as their girlfriends screamed Darren, Darren

and more joined in cos it's a free country of battlers you can't stop

the music feeling no pain punching headfuls of shirt with a smoke

in one hand pissing green and gold darkness from an old semi-naked

twist top shrapnel wound … I'll never forget the bloke who told his

opponent Ah pull your pants up, mate before socking him straight

in the chops. To summarise: we are a noble people, unable to bear

ourselves without booze, if we can't blow things up we just fight

for the hell of it, our national day is a crucible of destruction,

and I want to go home, I just want to go home, but this is where I live.

 
Note

Skyshow: In Perth there is an annual Australia Day fireworks display set to music by a commercial radio station.

Toby Davidson and I will be doing a gig together in Canberra on June 9^th at the Gods, so I pulled out his book Beast Language which I had purchased after hearing him read for the first time at Hares & Hyenas here in Melbourne. I hadn't quite finished it – the one hour train ride home from Flinders Street to Carrum is not quite long enough to read a whole book. So there's quite a few sitting there in the almost-read pile. And Beast Language repaid the effort to finish it off and knock it on the head and choose just one poem for the blog and then shelve it somewhere between Adrian Coleman and Bruce Dawe. It's a bit of a goer, his first book. As Judith Beveridge opines in the blurb – 'Toby Davidson never lets the dust settle.'

http://fiveislandspress.com/catalogue/beast-language

Tuesday Poem - 'The Threepenny Kowhai Stamp Brooch' by Jennifer Compton

The Threepenny Kowhai Stamp Brooch

If I get lost someone will pick me up and post me.

I am already licked and stamped on my green lapel.

The brooch from Te Papa will see me safely home.

It's 3^D — as in LSD — pounds, shillings and pence.

Let us go out and do the passegiata on the waterfront.

If and when I get lost, you can slide me into the red box.

Of course I will be posted back into the past —

back to when kowhai was pronounced kowhai.

I got my six monthly statement for This City from Otago University

Press today. And oh dear, not one sale. Just a lot of 0s and a $1.30

carried over from the last statement. What a pitiful document it was.

So I emailed and asked how many copies are left. Just 84. So when

the present liquidity crisis eases, I shall order them in 10 at a time and

flog them at cost at poetry readings. (It's a handsome book, but an

expensive book. $30 plus postage for the average punter. About $12

for me.) I haven't given that book a fair chance to sell out. I shall

renew the struggle.

I picked this poem to represent the book because it has done well

for itself, although I was extremely doubtful when I wrote it if I could

place it. I couldn't see how the different pronunciations of 'kowhai'

would work on the page. But Les Murray took it for Quadrant, then

it was in Best New Zealand Poems on line – then it was in the book

The Best of Best New Zealand Poems. And the last time I was in

Palmerston North, Joy Green told me they were teaching it at Massey.

So woo hoo little poem.

A dear friend had bought me the brooch, from Te Papa of course. I was

wearing it when Fiona Kidman took me on the Writers Walk around the
waterfront. We started at her plaque in Oriental Bay and worked our way
 back to Queens Wharf. Then we stopped for a coffee, and as I walked
towards the table, the poem presented itself to me, fully formed. One of
those ones you get for free.

http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/Thiscityjennifercompton.html