THE MERRI CREEK : POEMS & PIECES, #5, August/September, 2008

LOUISE CRISP


Three Poems from HIGH KEY
After White Light, paintings by Owen Piggott



#5


If I walked this land
I would walk
With all the ones
Who accompany my journey :
Thin pillars of light
Crossing in front of distant
Purple swamps
Walking sideways
In search of a river
In the desert
Or due north
To face the region
Of emptiness and water
The sifting place of being
Where endless stories are told
Of the hardest places to encounter.



#8


Land offers the illusion
Of water
As light recedes
From the darkened plains.
The night-land speaks
Only to itself of darkness
Which light can not assuage.



#12


Light encounters the land.
It breathes
It knows no other way.
In another time
Light destroyed the land
But today
It calls to the land
Whispers and speaks
Of its longing
And joy :
Land, dark one
let me be
And land responds
Across the borders
Of its horizon
And touches the sky.




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SUSAN FEALY



THE EARTHING OF RAIN


The trees are bottom heavy.
Each leaf, a clay gourd, streaked
in silver, steeped in wet light.

A colony of quiet ears
listens to damp air and spill of sky.

Stilled moths, their wings
are tilted to earth, and memory
of cool, dark waiting.




*



ALMOST PALIMPSEST


It was that time before dawn, and the words
were flapping again. They hung on black wings.
They gazed at him, waiting. He shut his eyes.
He glimpsed a swarm of shadows like a silence
before a hammering of bees. They massed now
a tumult of black, a writhing meniscus of wings.
They stormed at him. He flung his arms out.
His body slowed to sculpture on his bed.




----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



MAL McKIMMIE



MY LIFE AS A SONNET


Oh?
You,
Him?
No!

Me,
You?
Yes!
Ohhh!

Wait!
Bye.
No!
Yes.

Why?
Oh...


*



MOON MANTRA



munificent mark, miracle manna,
medusa mary, maenad maelstrom,
mariner's mainstay, madmen's madonna,
muse misremembered, myth metronome,

mend me magnetically, mine my marrow,
make my macula manifest mirror;
map mind's masquerade, mete me my morrow;
maim me mortally, meeken me, mentor.

maladies maggot me,mammon mauls me,
my mephitic metamorphosis mass;
murdered millions, mourning, mill memory.

master my minotaur, midnight matador;
marry me mild, my magdelene mistress;
mantle merciful, matrix, my metre.




*


ON THE NON-EXISTENCE OF SAINTS


She dies. Her poor but secretly loved body
Cracking open like a pod ready with seeds.
But there are none: her afterlife has been
Spent fully in this life -- she is empty.

Her light has been shed fully, deed by deed.
Nothing happens because there is nothing
Left to happen. Our prayers remain unanswered,
So we believe. And we still, of course, believe.



*


ALL ODOURS ARE PARTICULATE


Smell is the sharpest of the senses and Memory's servant.

The flesh of the child that is now never-to-be-born
decomposes in your corporeal future.

This wind upon your face is necessary.



----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



TIM SINCLAIR



BEFORE YOU WILL FLY


Before we made love we forgot our way. Before us
the way was dark and twisted. Before we could fall
we had to rise, but our wings were folded in the night. Damp
and filled with promise.

Down was a long way, and fall was the new rise. You held me.
That night in the forest, before sailing, before the fires.
You sent long, scorched letters, scented of vinyl
and ammonium nitrate. I struggled to reply.

Before this, there was nothing.



*


SUB TERRA


The exterior

is insignificant, barely perceptible
among the creeping vines.
You would think perhaps
a burial mound, if you thought about it
at all, speculating on symmetry
as you wait for your exhaustion
to lift, or the spongy leaf litter to swallow you
traceless, as you've feared it would
since you entered this jungle.


The interior

is vast, and cannot be crossed
in a single day's horse ride. So it is said.
Nobody has attempted it. A day's ride
would be hard to judge, in any case.
There is no surprise or sunset in the city,
simply a uniform, sourceless glow.
Slightly orange tinted, as though the sun
were forever incipient. The inhabitants move
at a constant pace.


In public

there are Sun cults. Prophets of dawn
in ecstatic masks, whose talk of the morning sun
is contagious. Once taken in
they have their eyes put out for seeing
what is not there; their tongues removed
for the spreading of lies. And then
their hearts crushed between stones
for giving false hope.


In private

there is a story that survives,
giving secret comfort as it is handed along.
It is not of Sun this story speaks, but of Darkness.
Night and sleep and untouched dreams,
the welling up of cellars and the cloaking of the sky.
The dark. The endless, depthless dark.



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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES:

LOUISE CRISP's latest collection is Uplands (Five Island Press, 2007).
SUSAN FEALY grasped the concept that a poem is not completed after a first draft about twelve months ago and has been writing poetry often since then. Accepted for publication in Verandah, Page Seventeen, Mollusca and the anthology Melbourne Reflections. She lives in Melbourne where she works as a clinical psychologist. Contact, susan@ramp.net.au
MAL McKIMMIE born in Perth, WA & currently lives in Melbourne. Published in numerous Australian journals including Salt, Westerly, Blue Dog & in Best Australian Poems 2006 (Black Inc). His first volume of poems, Poetileptic, published by Five Islands Press (2005). Included in Take Five (Shoestring Press, UK), anthology of five Australian poets f'coming in 2009. Contact, mal2411@hotmail.com
TIM SINCLAIR mainly writes poetry. It's a strange curse to have been afflicted with. His verse novel Nine Hours North published by Penguin in 2006. Here be more : www.timsinclair.org

ALL THE GOSS #2

Pretty good when a singer-songwriter finds & makes song of your poems, which is what we heard at Collected Works last Saturday, 28/4/07, when Gen Fitzgerald, guitar, returned the favour of Louise Crisp's reading from her new book, Uplands. I think it was the first time Louise had heard the song. Great compliment & potentially instructive interpretation. A pity that not many Melbourne poets or poetry audience were there (--I remember years ago Alan Wearne warning that Autumn & Winter Saturday afternoons were a no-no in Melbourne because of the footy, and in his case could not attend anything if the Dons were playing!). FIP publisher Ron Pretty explained it to one of Louise's supporters as typical of the Melbourne scene's response to out-of-town & inter-state poets : if they know you there's a chance, if not, not! But Louise Crisp has been around for many years, though Bairnsdale is a long way away, & maybe further in the imagination than Warnambool (--note that Brendan Ryan will be reading/launching in town soon, also for FIP) or Geelong, Castlemaine... Ah well, quality not quantity as they say, but audience is important not least because of sales & distribution of the project that's probably been in train for a significant time. I certainly dont go to everything so probably shouldnt grizzle, but neither do I restrict attendance to one particular venue or stable of writers. Event- saturation, restricted time & energy are proper excuses but lack of curiousity & other species of laziness dont wash!
Paul Sinclair's launching speech was a classic meeting of worlds. (Mr Wearne's still in my head for some reason but I immediately recall Judith Brett's speech for Alan's The Nightmarkets (publ. Penguin), back in the 80s (85? 86?), at the Napier Hotel, around the corner from Collected Works when it was in Smith Street : Judy's own Melbourne- politics- & -sociology enthusiasm & expertise was probably perfect reception for Alan's narrative. Sociology isnt often the most understanding of optics for poetry but, whatever I may have muttered at the time, it was for Alan Wearne that day.) Paul Sinclair, speaking as an environmental scientist (& the author of The Murray : A River & its People, MUP, '01), was eloquent & persuasive in his support of both the activism & the poetry that informs book & poet. Just as the fish of this or that river is imbued with the taste of its own place so, he stressed, is the language. Louise's language of rocks & rivers is particular to her place, and of late the Snowy has been her prime topographical & political location. Of course we would respond that the poetry, & Louise's in particular, isnt a transparent window on & for the place. But for one who's been where the poet's been, or wants to be so transported, who's drawn into & yields to that empathy, it is crystal clear! Certainly Dr Sinclair, for one, spoke as a true believer influencing us all to the same opinion! The qualification I shared with Andy Jackson when we chatted afterwards was that the literary references in this book are a counterpoint or a descant to her main voice, and that such references boost other themes & glintings. For example, Rene Char is a significant signpost in the book, but isnt the first reference when one thinks of environmentalism or even environmental poetry. Ashbery's there too, John Anderson, John Forbes, Cixous, Machado...
I look forward to the reviews...
At not too wide a tangent to the Crisp & etc, talking with Barry Hill recently about Gary Snyder, whose new book of essays, Back On Fire, has arrived, I said how the poet-scholar-activist Snyder still has, maybe always had, dirt under his fingernails (--I got the same impression about Paul Sinclair). There's a lumberman background there, a climber, a traveller. He's part of the world and therefore within the critique he mounts. And yet, in 1981, listening to him at the Montsalvat poetry festival, I had another point of view. It was in response to what I thought of as an earth [earth first?] fascism, which I'd broached regarding poems by Jonathon Griffin (for which I sometimes felt Tony Rudolf, his friend & publisher, never forgave me) : Snyder's blue jay scorning the humans on the ground as nuclear-armed jets screeched overhead...a bit like taking the side of the cockroaches as the great survivors! My point being (& Michael McClure's wonderful yell,"I am a mammal patriot!" still rings in my ear), surely it's disingenuous to forfeit or deny humanity (one's own type of being, one's only agency in Being) in order or by way of criticising human dastardry & silliness. I know Barry's been into Snyder for the past year or so but havent caught up with his writings yet. And I've been back with Snyder in Kerouac's representation as Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums' correspondence with my brother Bernard [see On The Dharma Bum(s) With the Hemensley Brothers elsewhere on this blog], which has returned me to Snyder's poetry (especially his take on Han Shan) and from there right to the T'ang dynasty poets and thinking about Taoism vis a vis Buddhism...
What else? Returning to the poetry & music theme : a marvellous feature of the programme for the launching of Kathryn Hamann's Saint Moon (from Richard Hillman's Sidewalk Books), at St Dunstan's Anglican Church, Camberwell (April 22/07), was her daughter Judith's perfect playing of the exquisite piece for cello by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks... Ignoramus that I am, I'd not heard of Vasks, but immediately felt this was the territory of Arvo Part, Aulis Sallinen... Apropos science & sociology meeting poetry (as per Brett & Sinclair above), Sue Stanford's speech was strung (more cello?) between social history & mythology. Most striking was the particularly threatening portrait she drew of the cultural & political milieu for the Australian family of the 50s & 60s ,from which the poet Kathryn Hamann emerges. Sue Stanford was relating the ramifications of attitudes of the day to the life of the family, suggesting that the poems in Saint Moon were an urgent recapitulation of such general & particular trauma. That sounds dry but it was a scintillating address...

May 3rd, 2007