Tuesday Poem - 'Night Watch' by Robyn Rowland

Night Watch

Time is elastic, its zenith fit to breaking

when you wait for the ambulance – now leaning over him,

now rushing back and forth from house to street straining

for sirens, night so dark and wet and quiet out there.

Listening for breath in a slight boy of fifteen years

is an ancient art requiring silence. Kneeling on your hall floor,

ear right to his lips, beside the frenzied shouts of his father,

whose panic of pacing is the only thing he can offer him.

Your own son watches his friend from the corner,

slumped, slightly beaten, the first fire of alcohol seeming

less necessary than it might have been, not worth the effort now,

while the friend he tried to carry home lies on his side, still.

Slapping his rump to try and wake him feels like assault.

Strange to be able to do things he would never allow,

ice you run across his cheeks a cruelty. Beyond limp,

he will not jerk away, open his mud-brown eyes.

When they finally come, wearied knights of the new wars,

they cannot rouse him, tell us it's not good, open his lids to pupils

so huge, so pitch and utterly void, his mother gasps, sinking,

and you never saw anyone so unconscious who wasn't dead.

You make your son sit and watch. They strap on an oxygen mask,

fail to open his mouth for a tongue block, quietly ask what he took -

vodka yes, but weed? pills? needles? No. Just vodka. Straight.

“He was kicked,' your boy says, 'they punched me in the head.' And vomits.

Clipped on a stretcher, they lift him out of the hall. In the long night,

fourteen hours twisted in tubes before he rouses, you remember

they loved pizza by the swimming pool for the last three birthdays, watched

videos, Xbox, played Star Wars with Darth Vader the only enemy -

and when you turned sixteen no-one had parties at all.

Robyn lives in Ireland and Australia so she launched her new book Lines of Drift (Doire Press) both there and here. I caught the Aussie launch by Catherine Bateson at Collected Works here in Melbourne and invested in a book. I must say I liked the epic poem Unbroken Stone In A Stubborn Sea – but just too long for a blog I reckon. Again the scroll scroll scroll problem. But this mini-drama called Night Watch caught my attention. Such a shriek of a poem. Recollected in tranquility, as they say.

http://www.doirepress.com/writers/k-z/robyn_rowland/

Tuesday Poem - 'Wondernight' by Alex Skovron

Wondernight

for Zofia Radwańska

1

I was a child

when a picture book

brought me this/

a study

dark among its panels

the household

asleep/ a pendulum

somewhere

softly clicks/ midnight

Suddenly

bookshelves stir/ the books

are coming to life

they wake/ start

to converse/ glide or file

to the floor

begin a vigorous

debate/ each volume utterly

unlike the next

It is a wondernight

of books

the room vibrates/ colours

& covers throb

pages windmill/ a dance

of books

that should have stayed

the shelf

where day belongs

2

Try to recatch

the colour of that tale

I fell for/

find

I can almost

close my memory

around it

almost/ stubborn is the

old steep

impossibility

to be a little boy

again

3

Dwindling

the night gives notice

to return/

the books

must reinstate a front

for the sun

a facade/ for morning

to discover

perfect order/ shelves

repossessed

the spines & sequences

restored

4

And I wish

that I could hold this

Polish fable once

more in my hand/ protectively/

lest by the colour

it no longer

lent/ the flaws

in the text

& the art

I picked at/

these books should finally

close their dream

& I/ unreconciled/ resume

my book

to book search for myself

I missed out on Alex Skovron's launch of Towards The Equator; New & Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattman 2014) but I did catch him reading at The Dan recently, and that was a treat. He brings such force and colour to the work when he reads. (As if it doesn't contain enough already!) The poem I chose comes from his 1988 book The Rearrangement, and the title poem is a stunner. But too long, I thought, for a blog post. Scroll and scroll and scroll. I can only suggest you invest in a copy and have a good browse through the greatest hits of one of our best poets. Alex really knows how to poet! (I also enjoyed very much, on my first time through this book, the selections from his 1999 book Infinite City. Oh and The Man and the Map 2003.)

Tuesday Poem - 'Shoes' by Bryan Walpert

Shoes

How they make their way

towards the back door.

A row of them, his, hers,

each day picked up, placed

in a closet rack. Pair after

pair they return, as if willed,

as if marking a thing in the heart

left undone.

This pair wants the garden.

This the rain. This the feet

prowling the carpet, late, baby

in arms, a creature unable

to walk or to crawl, yet who

knows she wants to be moved

to sleep, rests only in motion

from one room to the next,

will recall nothing of these days

of pure need filled only by

those who want nothing more

than to get through each cry

to the swinging bridge of silence

before the next, nothing more

than to move this moment

except, perhaps, to hold it,

like this swaddled bundle

she takes so he might

wash a dish, fold

a shirt, put away shoes

unaccountably returned,

open-mouthed, as if surprised

by their own hunger: this pair

wanting the puddle, this

the hard slap of stone,

the-run-across-against-the-light,

the wait-up-for-me-guys,

the that's-my-cab-

this-is-my-life-

I-will-not-look-back.

What fun I had earlier this year travelling around New Zealand with the other two Hoop-La poets, Bryan Walpert and Carolyn McCurdie. And didn't our books do well! All three in the best seller list!

https://nznationalpoetryday.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/hoopla-poets-blitz-bestsellers-list/

And it was so much fun that Bryan and Carolyn are whooping over to Melbourne in late August to do it all over again. They are at the House of Bricks on Thursday 27^th August and The Dan on Saturday 29^th August and Sporting Poets on Sunday 30^th August. (For details see below.)

But the one I am organising is the big one on Friday 28^th August – A Big Read to Celebrate NZ Poetry Day - with 24 local poets and our two visiting poets joining forces at Collected Works in the Nicholas Building 37 Swanston Street from 5 – 9 pm. It's going to go off. I can guarantee.

https://www.facebook.com/events/499513710213775/

Thursday 27^th August – 6-30 pm

House of Bricks, 40 Budd Street Collingwood

Saturday 29^th August - 2-5pm

Poetry At The Dan – Dan O'Connell Hotel - 225 Canning Street Carlton

Sunday 30^th August 5pm

Sporting Poets – The Charles Weston Hotel - 27 Weston Street Brunswick

Tuesday Poem - '40' by Jennifer Compton

40

I feel like a piece of steel — maybe

a railway track, laid out, for travelling.

I feel like a well of deep water

dangerously cold — liquid.

I feel as if I could love — someone or something —

like a living arc of burnished gold (or a rainbow).

I could let go and love like the very devil.

I'm a doona stuffed with rose petals —

lightweight, mettlesome and fragrant.

I speak all tongues: I could be of some use.

I am in the very centre of the paradox — I am huge

and without having to think of it — I am minute.

This is a renaissance: this is the beginning of my life.

I am on fire with that first simple flame of birth —

air incinerating skin, helpless limbs and lolling head.

Myths and icons sloughed, orphaned at last,

I have no opinion worth having,

coming into that kingdom of wanting nothing —

waterproofed, created, solidified. 

I'm at that time of life (not 40 any more) when I am starting to think about putting together a Selected. So for the first time for a long time I am going back to old books. Seeing if I still like anything I wrote so long ago. This one, for instance, I wrote 25 years ago! And I do still like it, so hot damn! I was googling to see if I could find an image of the book cover, and it is surprising how many second hand copies are available out on the intertubes. (But pricey, what with postage, very pricey.) I did spot one copy being sold in the UK that has an inscription to the previous owner! Who can that be? Who did I post an inscribed copy to, or who travelled to England and took the book with them? I am consumed with curiosity and if only it was a tiny bit cheaper I would invest in it just to find out whom!

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