Rodney Williams

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Rodney Williams has had poems published in various journals, including Overland, Blue Dog, Five Bells, page seventeen, The Paradise Anthology & Tasmanian Times, along with Poetry New Zealand and Antipodes. His haiku and tanka have appeared in a range of periodicals in Australia and America, as well as in New Zealand, Austria, Ireland and Canada. Also publishing critical pieces and short fiction, Rodney regularly performs in Spoken Word events, with readings broadcast on radio. A secondary school teacher of English and Literature, he has led workshops at regional writers’ festivals.  In collaboration with painter Otto Boron (twice named Victorian Artist of the Year), in 2008 Rodney Williams produced the book Rural Dwellings – Gippsland and Beyond.

From Muir Woods to Walhalla

A triolet for my son Rohan

in a fresh forest stream – headwater-clean –
our blood-folk close, in a united state,
you once spied a crawdaddy no one had seen;
in a fresh forest stream (headwater-clean)
you find fingerling trout now, kingfisher-keen,
just as your sight’s clear, when kindred debate;
in a fresh forest stream, headwater-clean,
our blood-folk close in – a united state

First Aid

for Hazel

our mother was superintendent
to a red cross service company –
no mere charitable collectors
her crew staffed the local blood bank
while every winter weekend
in their tin booth at the netball
they’d patch up bitumen grazes
staining knees with gentian violet
soothing sobs with reassurance
 
from calico we kids would fashion
slings not sipped in Singapore –
as a hearthside cottage handicraft
we’d fabricate injuries in maché
stiff as splints on limbs still slender
sporting wounds in livid enamel
with bones jagged in card protruding
compound fractures if not interest
money tight as snakebite tourniquets

at ambulance first-aid courses
my sisters and I played patient
well schooled in all our symptoms:
a car wrecked out on the roadside
could host a training exercise –
when the fire brigade held a back-burn
our mum might stage a mock disaster
with her offspring cast as victim
a role we’d each learnt all too well
 
father had no drinking problem
if he’d another glass to drown in –
with her marriage past resuscitation
mum was made citizen of the year
likewise honoured by the queen:
filling a host of poorly paid positions
the old girl kept us kids together
the greatest service to our company
her toughest first-aid exercise of all

Black Betty

a Wilson’s Promontory Myth
 
Black Betty, settlers called her –
a fiery piece but not half bad

on my rounds of Wilson’s Promontory
coming back from Sealer’s Cove
as park ranger I spot a hitcher
bare skin dark as any full-blood
her thumb more down than out
 
I’ll drop her off at Tidal River
some decent clothes we’ll find her
no one over there she’ll bother –
as I wind down my window
pretty Betty starts to speak

 

whitefella whalers, redhead sealers
rank with blubber, sperm and steel
all foul breath and sickly chests
rummy heads and scabs undressed
my eyes despise them still
                                              
not enough to take our hunting
they forced their way between my legs
till like harpooned meat I bled   
then with a blade made for flensing
from my trunk they docked my head
 
leaning against this ranger’s truck  
I lift my noggin off my neck
to place my block upon his bone –
vanishing yet I haunt his sight
as white folk vouch by campfire light

 

Black Betty, he still called me –  
did I send the wrong man mad?

Stephen Edgar

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Stephen Edgar has published seven collections of poetry, the most recent being History of the Day (Black Pepper Publishing), which was awarded the William Baylebridge Memorial Prize for 2009. “The Fifth Element”, from which three sections appear in this issue of Mascara Literary Review, is one of three interlinked narrative poems at the heart of his next book, Eldershaw.

                                                             Photograph by Vicki Frerer

The Fifth Element

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.

                                                Philip Larkin

December 1945. Isabel. Earth

Her tread, light as it is, disturbs a floorboard
And sends the footnote of a seismic shiver
Up through the kitchen table, registered
By a faint tinkling of the beads that weight
The doily on the milk jug she left out.
It’s probably gone off. Those words of his
Set up their tremor too among her thoughts,
The faintest ringing, practically too low
To be recorded in her consciousness,
At least until the day’s competing noises
Had quietened and left her clear. The moon,
As big, it seems, as earlier the sun
Which weighted down the sky’s opposing quarter,
Sheds the revers of that illumination,
As though she looked again at the same scene
The other way, as though the sky turned round
And showed her from behind its silver stitching.
She’s left him sleeping—Isabel assumes
That Evan’s sleeping—and slips quietly
Away through this interstice of the dark
To think it out. One more reversal, this,
It now occurs to her: four years ago,
She’d slipped out briefly on their wedding night
To say goodnight (at that hour?) to her mother,
Though really, if the truth were told, to pause
A little longer in that strained abeyance
Before the feared requirement of the flesh
That she must answer. Was it a mistake?
Marry in haste, repent at leisure. Not
The least of this war’s fateful dislocations
Was speeding sweethearts to the marriage bed
Who might have thought again, given more time.
But who can unsay love? And she would not
Have seen him off into that conflagration
From which he very well might come no more
With nothing but the memory of a wish
For what had never been to set beside
His everlasting absence. She at least
Could call herself his widow, no small thing
To salvage from the ruins of the world.

But there. He had survived. He did come back.
And she had met him at the Quay to end
The long hiatus between consummation
And married life, and they had come down here
To have a few days’ quietness alone,
The two of them, before their lives should start.
And maybe he had died in any case.
He seemed a body uninhabited.
Late in the afternoon on the veranda
They’d sat out looking at the gentle hills.
A little way below, where the land sloped down,
A stand of gum trees gathered to itself
Such greens as summer nourished, while, beyond,
The paddocks muzzily laid out their grasses,
Parched in the faded memory of colour
The heat had left them, shifting separately
And different ways as you looked here and there.
The air seemed thick with powder, not a dust,
But some particulation of the light
Applied across, or rather through the miles
Between here and the faint blue hazy sky,
In which the sun, a smouldering orange disc
Behind a screen, was sinking gradually
As though the air resisted its decline.
How beautiful she thought it. “I don’t know,”
He said at last, “it all looks dead to me.”

December 1978. Luke

The lassitude of Christmas makes a dull
And heavy progress through him like a drug.
Is it the season or the humid weight
Of air, or their perverse coincidence
That always settles on him when he visits?
Or is it that? His simply visiting,
Which, like the signal that a hypnotist
Implants, brings forth at once its cued behaviour?
“You can’t go home again.” Well, yes, and no.
He thinks of yesterday’s transparent rage
That Isabel and Evan stared straight through,
Oblivious. When Isabel recounted
How round at Angela’s Craig slapped their son
For some slight naughtiness not worth the notice—
More than one slap, and hard, which left him howling—
Evan, all indignation, had exploded
And called Craig all the names under the sun
For such brutal reproof. Jesus, Luke thought,
Look who is talking. He remembers well,
If Evan can’t, being summoned by his voice
Out to the dark street of a Sunday night
When, under television’s new enchantment,
He stayed too long a few doors down the road.
He stood beneath a street light, friendly-seeming,
And when Luke reached him, up his right hand rose
And down the strap flashed, curling like a whip
Around his legs—imagined more than seen,
Felt more than both—again, again, again,
To send him screaming home, where there was more
Considered application. Called to the bathroom
To have the red welts on his backside soothed
With ointment, in his terror he believed
More strokes were yet to come. Nor was that night
Uniquely memorable. Such violent
And such incontinent fury, where did they
Break out from when they took him? Who was he?
“What are you looking so self-righteous for?”
Evan barked savagely at Isabel
On one occasion when she glanced at him
Her pale unspeakable reproach. Those words,
They’re scored like strap marks in Luke’s memory.
To know all, as the old saw glibly has it,
Is to forgive all. Who can know so much?
Blocked by such banked-up anger and resentment,
Luke bit his tongue and let the moment pass.

Later he wanders up to the garage
Where Evan’s pottering. A peaceful and
Companionable mood rises between them
In idle conversation, punctuated
By silences that almost seem like touching
And say as much as words, especially
Since both of them know perfectly what subjects
May not be spoken of. “Here, hold this, mate.”
Luke grips the fishing rod and keeps it steady
While Evan winds the twine, eyelet by eyelet,
With single-minded care, one of those tasks
Of shared participation which enlarge
But don’t drag out the moment that they make.
Evan sings snatches of old prewar love songs—
Who can know so much?—in his expressive,
Beautiful and untutored baritone.

April 1945. Evan. Fire.

At some point in the flight, inevitably,
The Oxford would begin to sputter and stall,
No matter how precise were his instructions,
How clearly and methodically delivered,
How dire the consequences, should they not
Be followed faithfully. Up here in August,
The sky an excerpt from a pastoral
In watercolours, soft blue smudged with clouds,
And spread below, all stitched and hemmed with hedges,
And here and there the crocheted clumps of woodland,
Those meadows of unrealistic green,
So concentrated a viridian
You’d think that it would wash out in the rain
Like dye and stain the footpaths—floating here,
You wouldn’t know there was a war at all,
Not, certainly, a war that you were in
And might well die of, not so far away.
Amazing, with a little altitude,
How far his vision went—the width of England
All the way from the Wash to the Bristol Channel.
Too bad he could see across but not ahead.
And now the nose had dipped and down it went
In whining plummet, the white-faced trainee
In panic trying to regain control
Before that field, impossibly remote
From here, you’d think, reached up and through the glass.
Evan, who’d seen all this—oh, he’d lost count—
Dozens of times, was perfectly relaxed
And in good spirits. He secretly enjoyed
This part the best and usually turned,
As now, to tweak the trainee’s fear a notch,
And looked back ruefully with shaking head
At those exalted heights they’d fallen from,
Or down towards the cruel end that loomed
Below them. Judging to a nicety
The last safe moment, Evan snatched control
And pulled the plane up from its fatal dive.

That pastoral was over. In the war’s
Last months he does what until now he’s only
Been training others, and himself, to do.
What hand of destiny had chosen Bonn,
His favourite composer’s natal city,
For his first bombing mission? “Thus fate knocks
At the door,” Beethoven said of those four chords.
He played that mighty music in his head.
Hannover. Magdeburg. Each time a friend
Or more would disappear. Wiesbaden. Mainz.
At first you steel yourself not to return.
Eventually, though you don’t lose your fear,
You step aside, you step outside of it
And move in some dimension parallel
To life and sense and self. Each one of them
Was both unique and interchangeable,
Each death was every death. Stuttgart. Mannheim.
How tempting to persuade yourself that you
Are destined to survive. Don’t think of it.
Then fearful March. Berlin. Bremen. Erfurt.
Berlin. Berlin. Berlin. Berlin. Berlin.
The cold cramped cockpit and the juddering frame,
The searchlights calling you to come to them,
Scouring the sky for you, the rising fire
That seems to climb as high, the abrupt thud
Of guns that shake you sideways, and the fighters
That, thank Christ, a Mosquito can outrun.
And down there Germany, a starlit sky
As though the Milky Way has come to earth.
Each chosen city angry as a star
Burning with energy enough to make
Whole worlds. He doesn’t know, or cannot now
Allow himself to think, as one more night,
Delivered of his sole four-thousand-pounder,
He flies away, how that pure stellar heat
Is melting lives from bone and boiling blood,
Volatilizing screams from a thousand mouths,
Setting the corpses of Vesuvius
In charred arthritic postures underneath
The buildings burst around them—if they’re not
Calcined from history—sucking out the air
From cellars where the people cower, their lungs
Emptied and burnt out by the vanished breath.

Denis Gallagher

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Denis Gallagher was born in Sydney in 1948 and now lives in Blackheath NSW. He wrote his first poem as a student at Normanhurst Boys’ High School, and recalls that it included the word “shibboleths”. His enthusiasm for poetry continued whilst a student at The University of Sydney in the late 1960s, but it wasn’t until several years later while sharing a house with Ken Bolton and Rae Desmond Jones in the inner-Sydney suburb of Glebe that he became actively engaged with the writing of poetry, which lead to his first collection, International Stardom, published by Sea Cruise Books in 1977. He is the author of three other collections of poetry and a contributor to Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets, edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones (2009).

Istanbul

On the Bosphorus from Eminonu to Uskudar

An old man built me a memorial of words

In tribute to the poet Yahya Kemal

How his heart like incense permeates the years

An old man built me a memorial of words

A monument to loss, regret, huzun

How his heart like incense permeates the years

Another ferry departs

A monument to loss, regret, huzun

Hidden in the eyes of every Istanbullus

Another ferry departs

A dream, as though within a dream begins

Hidden in the eyes of every Istanbullus

The aimless, lost street dogs’ search

A dream, as though within a dream begins

Ataturk’s bronzed eyes look west

Aimless, the lost street dogs search

Where once the pasha’s grand mansion stood

Ataturk’s bronzed eyes look west

Still let me dream my country is unchanged

Where once the pasha’s grand mansion stood

If death is night upon some foreign shore

Still let me dream my country is unchanged

On the Bosphorus from Eminonu to Uskudar

Two Dogs of  Blackheath

I heard later

Those little dogs

Were Po and Mo

Chihuahuas

Of Prince George Lane

Quiet on the lounge

Alert at the window

Under the curtains

Chewing the air

Their mistress

The barmaid

Told me their names

Short for Poetry

And Motion

Her twin darlings

Abreast

Of  the moment

She’d pulled a beer

We laughed

At ourselves

Looked at the floor

Over and over

That  memory

Comes back

Every time

I walk

Up

Every time

I walk

Down

Their mistress

At home

Asleep on the lounge

I laugh again

At the thought

PoMo alert

Watch me pass by

Lost in the moment

Writing on air

Fiona Sze-Lorrain

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in French, English and Chinese. Her books include Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2010) and Silhouette/Shadow (co-authored with Gao Xingjian, Contours, 2007). Co-director of Vif éditions (www.vif-editions.com), an independent Parisian publishing house, and one of the editors at Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com), she is also a zheng (ancient Chinese zither) concertist. Her CD, In One Take/Une seule prise (with Guo Gan, erhu) will be released in Europe this fall. Her translations of Hai Zi’s prose will be forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2012, and she is currently completing a French critical monograph on Gao Xingjian’s dramatic literature. She lives in Paris, France and New York. Visit www.fionasze.com

Rendez-vous at Pont des Arts

                        After Brassai 

You’ll find me at Pont des Arts
where water remains water
till it moves between tolling bells

while your light feet carry speed,
you chase after disappearing bistros,
then find me at Pont des Arts.

In my bed on Rue de Seine,
we whisper and you touch my cheek,
charting out time with your fingers.

At my window on Rue de Seine,
I light a candle to look into your eyes
which find their way to Pont des Arts

without compass, without map,
as the bridge arches into time,
charting history across two banks.

Days connect years, years become places —
you travel over dreams or on bicycle.
Will I find you at Pont des Arts?
Moon crossing bridge in vanishing stars.

Fragile

The sea under our bed

holds immensity for sleepless

hours that belong to last night.

I am moon fishing while

waiting for you to open

your eyes and cry for light.

Crawling in the sheets, I fear

burying you in my dreams where

your tears drop as water

trickling from the sky, and I am

that instant of devastating white.

My Grandmother Waters the Moon

Ingredients: 1 pound red azuki beans, lard,
sugar, salt, white sesame, walnuts, flour

First, she imagines an encrypted message,
longevity in Chinese characters,
 
ideograms of dashed bamboo and mandarin
ducks. Grains of red beans churn in her palm,
 
their voices a song of cascading waters.
Rinses every seed warm to her touch, a blender
 
crushing them until they are sand
soft enough to waltz once a finger dips in them.
 
Jump, of course they jump!
As she splatters them over steamy lard, little
 
fireworks in the greasy wok. Stirs until
a crimson bean paste foams. Let it cool.
 
Now, the mutation. Meander white dough
into miniature moons, pert peering hollows
 
waiting to be parched with spoonfuls
of bean paste. Throw sesame. Or slices of walnuts.
 
Just more dough is not enough to seal each moon
with mystery — molding her message on top
 
of each crust, she now gives it a mosaic look.
War strategy? Emperor Chu Yuan-chang
 
performed the same ritual. He who’d construct
a new dynasty, slipped espionage notes
 
inside mooncakes. Soldiers lacquered their lips
over them, tasting bitterness of each failed revolt.
 
In 1368, they drove the Mongols north,
back to their steppes. Here she is in 1980.
 
About histories, she is seldom wrong.
Time to transform the mooncakes golden —
 
oven heat for thirty minutes. Her discreet
signature before this last phase: watering
 
green tea over each chalked face. What is she
imagining again? That someday grasses
 
sprout with flowers on the moon?
All autumn she dreamt of stealing
 
that cupful of sky. A snack
to nibble for her granddaughter, the baby
 
me, wafts of caked fragrance
a lullaby, tucked in an apron, sleeping on her back.

Jen Webb

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Jen Webb lives in Canberra, and is the author of a number of works including the poetry collection, Proverbs from Sierra Leone (Five Islands Press, 2004).

Bête à chagrin

a thin morning, Canberra cold, and the cat 

is sleeping outside, he’s dozing out there

dying in the sun, not knowing it, he thinks

perhaps how sunlight feels on skin, how birds’ wings

sound the air, he tastes the drugs on his tongue

this is the matter of his life

a life of feeling       not thinking. Of being       not might be

a human heart can’t be:  I am want, he is satisfied with is 

for him an easy death, for me old words 

like chagrin come to mind, and I

must make the call, rule the line

he purrs again, I stroke his staring coat 

he’s metaphor of course; all cats are, all loves

he blinks, dying in the sun

I can’t find the gap between want and ought 

now might be shifts into will and don’t becomes yes

the sun the only bright spot on a hard-edged day

Outside Euclid’s box

the cyberworld has given up the fight: space is still solid,

time remains a mystery, the fundamentals still rule – that

geometry of one and three, time and space, that box our world

but you know, and I know, time is sometimes now, sometimes then

or when: outside Euclid’s box it folds like a paper crane, taut

surfaces hiding what Euclid could not know;

tug the paper wing and time is squeezed in here, stretched out there

the walls shift, the tremble takes its time, one wall falls, three

remain – height and length and width – they shudder

as space shifts like a tale; as there is folded onto then

as where is drawn out beyond what seemed to be its end –

what remains?

the story arcs from me to you, time trembles, and space,

the walls fail: when does far away become

just here, or then become now? When

does that old arc thread

here to there, the line from then to now,

the story, the trembling tale?

Wednesday morning

So here we are again, back at the tipping point

poised between stop and go

Another Wednesday lifts its blinds to check the day.

Sun, again. Blue sky.

A flotilla of clouds heading this way

morning light of course on leaves.

Below the tree three birds stand, eyes on the sky

where the hawk takes his thermal ride

the little birds describe his flight

then freeze as he turns their way.

The tree falls still; even time hesitates: the clocks run

to and fro

confused by the unlikely sky

Janus scratches his head, looks to

and fro, defers the day

Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Kelly lives in Perth, Western Australia. She has a BA Arts and a Postgraduate Diploma (Creative Writing) from Curtin University. Her poetry has been published in print and online journals. Her first collection of poetry, People from bones (with co-author, Bron Bateman) was released in the UK and Australia in June 2002 (Ragged Raven Press, UK.)  Her poem, “Venus of Willendorf” was selected for the anthology, The Best Australian Poetry 2009.  

Evolution Fail

A mule is the hybrid
result of the doomed pairing
of a male donkey and female horse.

The challenge for every mule
is to live a life with an uneven
amount of chromosomes.

Knowing beyond anything else
their legacy to this world
will never be borne of them,
but that their parents were revolutionaries.

Dance of the Seahorses

The parade has begun
his belly plump to exploding
water steed prickles
and prances before his maiden.

She takes his tail in hers, curls tight,
hangs on as they stretch
necks long and supple,
rising together in a rush of love-sick blood

to the idle surface.
Ever so deftly, he opens his pouch,
she delivers, releases and is gone.
 

Perspective

At a distance the photo
appears like a parachute of red and yellow,
laid upon the ground with dancers, long and lean,
limbs quivering on the centre podium.

A closer inspection reveals stamens and pistols
and pollen thrumming in the breeze, keeping time.

Janine Fraser

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Janine Fraser’s book Portraits in a Glasshouse was published by Five Islands Press, Series 10 New Poets.  She has also written numerous books for children, including the Sarindi series published by HarperCollins.  She lives in Riddells Creek, Victoria.
 

Red Tulips (1)

Tight brown

Fists shoved in dark

Earth pockets

Latent with

The rage of life’s

Short round

Put up their

Leather-red dooks

And deliver

A knock-out

Pummel of punches

In Spring.

Red Tulips (2)

Cut
They continue
To grow in glass

Adding
To themselves
About an inch a day

As reputation
Growing on decease.
Outrage

In the mouth
Of the water jug
They pour out

The peculiars
Of their common
Trouble

Voluble in
Their predicament    
As Plath––the ink-

Blot of
Their throats a dark
Puddled jotting

Last fevered
Poem got out on
A gasp

The flame
Going out in them
Putrefying water

Petal drop
Shocking as blood
On the hearth.

Remembering Stonehenge

Mid April, there is this fractal of a second

     Hand sweeping the clocks bland face,

          Through a day whirling with wind gust

Swirling the parchments of elm

     Into a mushroom circle dotting the grass

          Beneath the slow grind and twirl of

The clothes hoist hung with a rainbow

     Line of briefs, line of socks you peg in pairs,

          Stripe of shirts cuffing your cheek.

You know a mushrooms natural history––

     Science of spores dropped from the hem

          Of the circular skirt, the minute

Mycelium rippling out in the eternal

     Pattern of water disturbed by a smooth

          White stone––know the rings expansion

Is nothing more than the law

     Of urban sprawl, the vociferous animal

          Eating out its patch.  All the same,

This mythic round of pithy plinths

     Pushing up on stolid columns, is as magical

          As muttered lore of faery,

Mysterious as Stonehenge.  There

     Last year in a fine mist of the weather,

          You circled the great hewn rocks

Along the gravel path, the guide in your ear

     Making a monument of date and data,

          Dismantling the mystic.  The sky

Gave up its clouds.  Huddled under

     Your black umbrella, you surrendered

          Your ear-plugs and let the grey stones

Speak for themselves––of the ground

     They’re rooted in, the light they melt into,

          The trembling spaces between.