Summer Poetry Feature, Part 3: Lloyd, Clemens, Caddy, Ryan, Cooke, Rowland [01.12.2011]
Summer is. And so are these poems – here and now – for your reading pleasure. Part 3 of 4 to the SPUNC Summer Poetry Feature is below. If you missed them, be sure to have a read of our Winter and and Spring features as well.
Part 1: Skovron, Middleton, Spence, Mahemoff, Lowe, Brown, Curnow
Part 2: Wright, Gillam, Edgar, Mittal, Page, Reeves, Hecq
Part 3: Lloyd, Clemens, Caddy, Ryan, Cooke, Rowland
Part 4: Cronin, Hill, Sant, Shapcott, Collins, Gorton, Shepherdson
Migrants Dreaming ~ Peter Lloyd
— Would migrants dreaming —
would the Gitanjali Song Offering
know what to do with these exiled moments
of peacock bride-silks, waterfalls lustred with vanilla?
Purple-in-the-mist drifts over rooftops: windows melt into an Indian poem …
as ‘a lotus song in the jewel, her naked breasts play counterpoint to flutes’
and the sound of zithers drifting up the street;
— fragile — delicate as a sari of distance and silences,
Kashmir dreams itself over again, a fading light
— but outside time, another life
‘meeting the same souls and bodies that distantly were yours … ’
— until a bell rings through a falling dark of window boxes
and naked children fall into an ossuary of golden twigs
and fragile wishbones for the dead.
The surreal vanishes.
A door bangs back into reality.
And cold rain suddenly spatters through broken glass.
From a bulldozed squat in time —
hunched shadows from a window watch like cripples from the wall …
This poem appears in Peter Lloyd’s collection, A Fingerpost for Rembrandt, published by Wakefield Press
from The Mundiad ~ Justin Clemens
If philosophes of the Enlightenment
Opposed to science the religious bent,
Our catastrophic era goes to show
“To Believe” — is but the same verb as — “To Know”
And — like the Roman Empire in the days
Before it fell to crucifying ways —
Enforces such extremes of moneyed rank
As must make I.M.F. directors wank,
And blasts from every agency and channel
Its mania for bloody spectacle,
So that hard labour in the present age
Is done by those who mutely watch the stage,
For — though Marcel Duchamp’s bon mot might irk —
“It is the spectators who make the work,”
And are at once the truest and the most
Alienated of the toiling host,
Receiving not a single dollar for
The Sisyphean tasks that scrape them raw —
Whence, tirelessly dissatisfied, they range
Where nothing changes in eternal change,
From politics to love, to war, to sport
While all their yawning children hum — or snort —
Until there’s no good way to tell apart
Religion, Entertainment, Life, or Art.
So anthropos aptéros finds its ends
Bound by this Sovereign who unstopping sends
His voiceless envoys down the humming lines
That writhe and clutch like artificial vines,
To wring from flesh as if it were but grape
The wine that fires the sorrows of the ape,
Then sows those sorrows till the ape goes mad
And builds an empire on a micro-pad
Complete with Schizoid-Paranoiac traits,
Part Uncle Joe, Judge Schreber, and Bill Gates,
Where black-eyed boxes catch each sparrow’s fall,
And our bright globe becomes a disco ball
Whose beams irradiate the meanest rue,
So that the thought “Now’s Night” is never true,
And death-camps turn to service industries
Which strive to seek to find a way to please,
And never-ending webs of silicon
Become the Whole, Totality, The One —
So even Hobbes’s great Leviathan
Must tremble like the swollen lip of man
Before the New World’s Brave Principium
That money spurts as information’s come.
This excerpt is from Justin Clemens' mock-epic, The Mundiad, published by Black Inc.
Australia Day in Beijing ~ Caroline Caddy
Gas heaters in the walled compound.
Move with the crowd toast one side then the other.
The contrast makes me know how cold it’s been
meeting greeting juggling cold cans in cold hands.
Your glove takes mine from face to face
Finns Russians French Italians.
I can barely move my mouth.
You are the citizen here in my language.
You join a clutch of smokers then return.
It takes me where I thought I’d never want to be.
Then the anthem and I’m with my mob
taking pride in not knowing all the words.
I sing half-hearted your shoulder against mine
singing for me.
The babble resumes frozen air kisses.
Getting to be someone else because we are somewhere else.
I want to leave you know the way
through another and another room where the drinks are free
Then somehow we’re out together in the burning night
abreast and keeping step past walls past doors
no words no talk in the cold open streets
walking very fast.
This poem appears in Caroline Caddy’s collection, Burning Bright, published by Fremantle Press
Broad Bean Meditation ~ Tracy Ryan
The devil makes work for idle hands.
– Proverb
Firm and certain outcome of even the most slattern garden,
the uncountable counted on, pedestrian, insistent,
you force us into step, our loosest day must
grow up to embrace you the way we bend to a new
baby, image of generation and helplessness,
process compelled upon us who had no plans for this
and now by the white plastic bag-load, as if some warped
stork had cracked a joke at our expense and left a prodigious
gift in the kitchen – the whole shebang
wants blanching, wants freezing, wants dreaming up
new ways with old words, riffs on a rhyme already stuffed
down the gullet so long we’d retch if we didn’t know
we should be grateful, ought to answer the challenge,
get you in storage before it’s too late –
late for what, to resign you to compost,
faith in continuation? In the idea that there’ll
always be more? You most ancient of human foods.
I have measured out my life in broad-bean pods,
stained to the very fingerprints, that you might fix
my identity, criminality, complicit as I am in this rise
and fall thing, this giving and receiving, in no way
up to it but doing my bit.
This poem appears in Tracy Ryan’s collection, The Argument, published by Fremantle Press
Japanese Garden ~ Stuart Cooke
Take a world
and open it like a breath
in the cup of your hands.
Take some land soft as dough
and drop it
in a cool moon of water.
Take swamp hens, some ruffled swans,
let their songs shoot short bullets
over the waves of distant traffic.
Stop
while the swans’ long black necks curl
to the grass freshly growing
from the freshly laid dough.
Take lines of willow scrawled
on a creaming sky
and an exuberant breeze
to wrinkle the olive-green lagoon.
Now let their trunks rise
to tightly-woven clouds
and the wind brush the willow’s thick hair.
Take the path away from the children
chattering
like bristles of light.
Step towards a stone jetty and a dingy
with a small hole in the bow.
Take a man, half-grown, full
of conflicting sounds,
of the hiss of meat, of hair growing, of the hush
of what has already fallen.
Take this man.
Then, scratch light
from the wrinkling water
and whisper, Infinity.
Two ducks
keep diving.
Already, there are flowers whitening
for which he has no name,
and patterns slipping out
like flies dancing.
Please, take him away.
This man in sunset’s oven,
baking in time.
Take him from the noise:
that absurdly luminous lyre;
those wraiths shrieking in their graves
beneath monotonous, celestial stone.
La Serena, Chile
This poem appears in Stuart Cooke’s chapbook included in Triptych Poets 2, published by Blemish Books.
Wasting ~ Robyn Rowland
Ireland
August 1983
Your body carries
the smooth bronze of this foolish summer –
no rain in Ireland.
You are sinew, strung muscle, blithe strength
a finer study of my father’s limbs
arteries pulsing with exertion.
Nut-brown bloom is on you
and this mountain is no challenge to
your springing step,
though once the peak is attained
small crossing of its summit before descent.
Supple as the Mulcair over rocks
you move across terrain familiar as your hand and
the years tracking your eyes
beginning to furrow mortality.
Rapid urgency to move drives you
to expel, dispense
that bursting energy, danger in your flesh.
Decision made,
celibate, you fold your body away like
a best shirt
or those silk stockings my mother saved in
the war,
kept in a drawer till the battles ended
they were moth-riddled, mildewed from the damp. I
ache for this wasting,
to know age will melt you slowly to shapelessness
like old wax scraped from the frames
the honey long spun out.
Juiceless, left in the sun to soften
it will be reformed, reshaped.
no longer a container for that sweetness
but flareless candle,
life burned down inside,
wax melted inward
to lightless stub.
This poem appears in Robyn Rowland’s collection, Perverse Serenity, published by Spinifex Press.
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