From Poetry and Poetics Centre

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The Drunken Elk
(Tycho de Brahe 1546-1601)

It was as much a partial eclipse
of the soul that spurred him on—
the unimaginable predicted,
worked out! What could he do
but fall in love with calculations?

No use for either rhetoric or philosophy.
The elixir lay in exactitude,
this only true star travel: he became
a prodigy of numbers,
astronomer aristocrat, begetter
of majestic instruments, glass
and quadrant to probe the glittery
underbelly of the cosmos.

Ultimate observer and measurer.
Copernicus improved upon,
old tabulations castigated.
Bundler of astrologers into the wastebin
of fraudsters, shamans, panjandrums.

And then the impossible:
a new star where none should be,
not made from illusion or sinful mists.
Tycho said, ‘Nothing worse than
blind watchers of the sky.’
The star is fixed. Space is just
that much bigger than we thought.

Rewarded: an entire island his own.
He could instruct in leisure, in
comfort. Work perpetrated (and a glut
of bad poetry) by his own printing press.
His only loss a beloved elk,
tame but a drunkard, dead
from a beer-fed fall
down his polished stairs.

He brought the heavens into
a room and reproduced them
in globes, maps, engravings.
He made the infinite comfortable.

Giant eccentric with a silver nose,
bibulous as his elk, ferocious lord,
colossal entertainer, possessor
of no false modesty, gleaner
of all that is not trivial.
Kepler his only rival, ‘co-founder
of a new universe’, providing friction,
brilliant amateur: in awe of this
magician of measurement. And
equal hater first-class. Successor.

Dying at last out of misplaced
courtesy. Drunken as his elk,
bladder bloated, but refraining
from leaving the host’s gracious table:
dying of excess and stubbornness,
yet at the last wishing all
had not been in vain. His decision
to worship only one perceptible god,
the patience and art, dance
of figures called fact, called precision.

Shane McCauley

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Boy and Man

1. Dinner Time at the Chekhov’s

Amygdala, the spore of an ancient forest lodged there;
bitter almond of temporal lobe

where love is learnt through fear (a father’s fist
putting ripples in the table-top, the soup)

which tells our heart to flutter tachycardia,
flee its throat-burrow for the wide open corner

of the dining room (mother, daughter, son, son
and son flinching at once with the true obedience

of the reflex, an instantaneous attentiveness
better than love’s). Survival ends up looking

like a hare dragging its trap, the food of itself, closer
to the trapper lost in leafy reverie.

If you should ever need my life then come and take it.
A knack for defeatist love is fathered in the boy.

2. after Nikolai Pavlovich Chekhov’s memoir

We lay in our bed, a hot jostle at the shoulders,
a loneliness at the feet, mousing for each other.

A inch-width of light moved across our faces;
Aleksandr waved off its tiny march and uttered

‘Thrash me? What for?’ then sat up, frowning
cushiony confusion. Anton had been waiting:

from under his pillow came Vaska the horseman
already dancing, his joints of cane crackling

merrily; we were laughing before we’d woken
properly, before we knew we were happy.

3. after Natalia Golden’s letter to Chekhov

Little bastard Antoshevu,

You’re having, I know, a merry free-for-all

in Moscow. I’m glad.

I cannot belong to you any more, now

I’ve found for myself

a boy-tiger more suitable. I advise

you not to marry:

you’re still too young and write such rubbish to me.

As for the main thing

that interests me more than anything else:

your health—you don’t talk

about that. You have two certain diseases,

my Antoshevu,

amorousness of the blood and the spitting

thereof—the first may

not prove lethal, but of the second, I ask

please give me some words

if I give you the stamps. Perhaps you haven’t

yet forgotten your

Little Skeleton. … But if you have she can

imagine farewell.

LK Holt

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Cranky Fan
‘Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates’ (John Berger).

Here is her nest,
his stem-and-glass pride
lacquered in spiderspun silk.

And here my trickster friend
flairs his cardsharp hand,
her geisha flutter of fan.

My friend the blithe tumbler
snaps up midges on the stall
of his mad jinking flight.

She pipes on the rise,
this little reed of song squeaked out
as he dips and joggles down the creekline.

He is all tail to wag the bird,
and irrepressible – as random as amoeba.
She dances the jig of his light life.

I watch – I impossibly watch.
He is metaphor for distance,
for vast, evolutionary plotways.

In the grief of my time,
ironshod and slow,
I watch my cranky, delirious friend,

her weightless bounce,
his spinwheel progress,
the sauce in the spray of her tail.

I watch as he flips from sight.

Pete Hay

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Putting on your boots

The child’s boots are tough brown leather with holes
in each side of the heels for the prongs of the callipers.
The callipers themselves have steel rods at the sides
and at the top wide leather bands to circle the swell
of the calves. Each band’s held tight by buckles
and straps, each fixed with a buckle’s thick needle
through one of five eyelets in the strip of the hide.

The skin of my child’s hands is soft and light, faint
with peach. With my child’s fingers, I ease the boots
onto your feet, pivot the callipers into place, tighten
the straps and, standing behind you like a spine straight
to your curve, hold you close, and with my right foot
nudge your right foot. And when your right foot has slid
forward, with my left I nudge your left.

Together we take three steps until you slacken
in my grasp. Those callipers, you know, were long
gone when you died in the quiet of a private
room. It would be overly romantic to say that you
walked from the world. The night before, we sat
with you, through the seizures and the flash of diodes
spelling oxygen saturation and pulse.

I returned just after you had slackened, your flesh
warm beneath my touch. There was the old scar
on your ribs where a bed sore had formed like
an eyelet in the skin for a needle of normality,
and there, too, the persistent curve of spine. You left
us so gracefully with smiles for those who stayed
as if dying was the most natural thing to do just then,

like the way a peach holds and gives its juice,
or a calf’s skin lends itself to a child’s calf,
and a child’s fingers learn the workings of a thing.

Anne Elvey

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Amaveram

LOVE IS not linear, it moves back and forth, it circles us—
and sometimes leaves.
I remember still the forms in Latin of the verb to love—
Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.
I sputter-scrawled them across lined pages
before love lost its innocence and gloss;
later—and older—the writing moved from paper to flesh
as I moved under language.

How confident the ‘I do's',
secure in the happily-ever-after,
until dissolving, coffinless children
threw our future straight back at me.
I forgot how to hear and read and write the hesitations in my lover’s speech;
it too is a language
and the words of love—amo, amas, amamus—I love, you love, we love—
cannot evoke a chaos equal to the loss of love.

But still how wonderful
and strangely familiar
it is
to deny the calendar
and write:
amabam, amabas, amabat—
I was loving, you were loving, he was loving—
remembering past the wrinkles and droop of skin.

I can talk about love in six tenses,
and for different people,
and I know that love can be passive or active.
I can say, amabit, he will love
Or amati sunt, they were loved,
And amaverimus, we will have loved,
What’s more, I can say it all
In two different moods.

Funny to think of a word having moods;
I like to think of a word being
joyful,
exultant,
or passionate,
but the only choices are
subjunctive or indicative
which is not a romantic way to describe them at all.

These moods translate just the same:
amaveram, amavissem
both meaning I had loved—
amaveram, amavissem—
but perhaps the best is amaris.
What a name-gift for a child, as,
whenever anyone called her name,
‘Amaris, it is time to get up,’
or,
‘Amaris, come here,’
they would really be saying,
‘You are loved, you are loved.’

Sue Pearson

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Elegy from a Young Wife

Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds.
Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!
How will I live without you, my consoling one!
But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees,
And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.

'Orpheus and Eurydice' – Czeslaw Milosz

Each night I go down to the underworld
try to bring you back from the dead.

During the snatched hours of sleep
when the world slips out like a light,

I sing the same rhymes: breasts mute
stars against your back, hair loosed

like a veil between us, and fingers
that creep nocturnal and white

trained only to touch in feigned sleep.
Each night the wall of your back rises

and falls steady as a ventilator.
Your neck is soft with blood. You should

thank the gods I am not a vampire
just a woman who asks: What travels the blackness of that head?

Here, the landmarks never change:
mirrored hall, squat lounge, tall cuckoo clock.

Each night I face the dark gods
in quilted robe and bed socks, guard windows

clutching a mug of warm milk.
How did I land in this strange museum?

There were no signposts on the way
pointing to the dead.

Down the hall, two children sleep:
two sparrows cupped in a safe cave.

They pump my heart from another room.
Some nights a silver cord rises me

from the bed and floats me down the hall
to stand watching over perfect sleep

complete with beating hearts and lungs
and perfect milky thoughts.

Yet other nights, a passing plane tows
my heart blinking across the sky.

All this and still
you don’t move or stir or revive…

In the underworld only the blessed sleep:
the rest of us are alive.

Now the room has filled with the smell of your breathing.
It is old as soil used season after season.

A cuckoo warns,

its voice on springs, distant and already fading.
Outside, stars grind themselves away

and the moon gives up its pale fight.
I’ll lie here and wait. Tomorrow

one of us will rise to daylight.

Debbie Lim

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I am not Woman, I am not Child

Actually they take my wife and this is good thing, he says, and they let her go. He says. And he says they lock me up and the four walls actually they protect me.

This peace, he says, your country. This war. But on the inside, an arsenal of the mind. And actually I miss her and write her letter. This is not good thing no, but eh? But what can you do?

And actually they take my son too, he says, and they let him go, and he is child, and what child doesn’t love their mother?

And actually I loved my mother. And I was child once.

He says.

And really I am not man. I am beast, or beast is man, and vica versa. The same thing. And both. And they lock me here because I am not woman. And I am not a child, and I no longer love my mother. And actually they need to break the history of war from my body. With chains around my wrist, and my masculine grip. And I never loved my wife, and I never loved my child. What man does? I am a body, and in my body the memory of gunfire. And in my mind the memory of deceit, and actually there is no escaping. The program of memory. And it makes you. What your father did, like every man before you. Like every man. In my body here, actually is gunfire and sword and arrow, is knife, is club and sharp stick. Is fist.

This memory.

And actually what I run from is long story, he says. And as man I hold up my country, and underneath this country my body is crushed. Even after I escape. And in my body the memory of war and actually my body in this cell. This violence. And I turn it on myself. This need. This manhood urge. And I cut. And I bleed. And my bedsheet makes a rope. And a torn Coke can can make a blade. And razor wire can sever an artery. And actually I sew my lips shut and fight against myself with hunger. This body, this man. And actually I have no match, but inside my body is immolation. And rage.

And I loved my mother, and she is somewhere now, and she loves her son. Lives for him. And love is a softness that men bury deep. And actually that’s why. And they don’t trust. A whole country. Yours. That I ever loved my mother. So here I am.

And what I stand for. This body. And my son will be a man, and then what? Suddenly the memory of war. In his body. And in his mind the memory of deceit. This need to hurt. The one you fear, like we can’t help it. And they will throw him out, because only children can love. And women. And actually they wait for me. And they write me letter, and ask me when, and ask me why. This sad life. And actually, I can’t answer.

Christine Fontana

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Saturdays Home from Boarding School

Even on Saturdays my father would rise early,
in the cold-bleak and crackling dawn,
well before I heard him in the kitchen,
stoking the fire and making fried bread –
never French toast – from the left-over dripping
and stale bread he’d kept in the cupboard.

He would bring it to me on a tray –
such a delicious start to weekends away from school.
How could I not love him, how could
I not love this stranger, who made such offerings,
who would be gone before I got up

and would come home in the evenings too late,
too drunk, to see his newly polished work shoes,
his covered tea sitting on the cold stove-top plate,
and my finished homework, left open on the bench,
near where the lamplight stayed on.

Mark Miller

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Stitching Things Together, 2007

I: Tracing the pattern

I stab the curved needle
into broken skin
pulling edges together
with blue, nylon sutures

II: Alterations

my father was a tailor
on Haufgass in Zhetl, 1931
running his thumb
over loose threads

after he set the pigeons free
red ribbons tied to their legs on May 1st
he sat in Lushinkes gaol for months
urine poured into his Communist nostrils

my grandfather shared a bottle
of vodka with the guard
and put his son on board the SS Moreton Bay
in 1938, before the storm began

we sacrifice everything for our children
father said as he sewed coats in Melbourne
looking from the window down onto Flinders Lane
as men loaded mannequins into trucks

while Europe blazed and swallowed up
his youth, his love, his life
he basted coat sleeves
and pad-stitched lapels

III: Pressing the Seams

local anaesthetic wears off
the laceration begins to throb
the pain of the body
split open, returns

Leah Kaminsky

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The Archaeologist

We uncovered a plate of blue metal,
determined its length with our tools
until the arc of a wheel’s hub emerged

and we hauled the trike up from the ground.
When I call Jackpot! the other kids come
running from inside and next door,

drop to the ground and lay around the hole
like spokes to a hub. A shard of pottery;
the slim leg of a doll; empty medicine bottles;

a wrench—we turned them in our hands,
then ran upstairs and dropped the lucre
in the bath to wash away the soil.

I’d wait til there’s no moon
and quarry up strangers’ fields,
unearth old nails, flakes of glass

or an unticked watch. From a plane above
you’d think the town had left,
having dug up all its dead. One Sunday

I was too sick for church, when they left
I went downstairs and across a field.
I started with the rake, seeking indicators

past the topsoil. Items withhold their identity
til the last minute. I struck a white rock,
trawled away the dirt and brushed its coarse length.

There was a hollow down its side,
I got a hold with the pick, heaved it up
and the horsehead leapt from the ground

with my pickpoint shooting through its eye.
I lay opposite me in the bath; got it looking
all Sunday-best. I sat at the kitchen table

with the cleaned skull upright and centre,
waiting for someone to come home, to see
what disquiet I’d gleaned from the world.

Andrew Slattery

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The Wrong Grave

In the cemetery, standing around
in the warm winter sunshine,
chatting with seldom-seen relatives and friends,
having laid Wendy to rest
just short of her 61st birthday,
we feel thrust into a version of Death at a Funeral
when called together to be told
there’s been a mistake
and she’s been placed in the wrong grave.
The pallbearers,
doing overtime without complaint,
follow in the dignified footsteps of the undertaker
to transport her the hundred metres
to her proper resting place –
which we all agree is a much nicer spot
(and easier to find again later),
under the overarching branches of a slender gum tree.
Emptied of tears,
we gather again at the graveside,
a much smaller group than earlier,
concentrating on maintaining
a proper solemnity, as the pastor
(whose liturgy book prescribes
no ritual words for this eventuality)
improvises a prayer that makes
delightful straight-faced mention
of life’s ups and downs.
And it seems as if Wendy,
always thinking of others –
even on her deathbed apologising in a barely audible whisper
for not being better company –
is nudging us back into the world,
gently pricking the pompousness of our grieving
and comforting us with comic relief.

John Pfitzner