Phyllis Perlstone
Phyllis Perlstone, a Sydney poet, first worked as an artist and experimental filmmaker. She turned to poetry full time in 1992, taking courses in poetry at the New School for Social Research in New York. She has gained various awards, including the NSW Women Writers poetry prize in 2004, and was second in the National Women Writers poetry prize in 2005. She has published reviews and articles. Her poetry is published in various journals and anthologies including Westerly, Siglo, Social Alternatives, Notes and Furphies, Meanjin, Blue Dog and A Way of Happening. Her first book is You Chase After Your Likeness (2002), reviewed in Southerly by Jennifer Maiden, and by Louise Wakelin in Five Bells. Her poem “Music and Landscape and other Consolations” was included in The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology for 2007and her latest book The Edge of Everything published by Puncher and Wattman was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the 2008 Premier’s Awards for N.S.W, and ‘Ondine’ was included in Motherlode, 2009.
(Photograph by Max Deutscher)
Hokusai
after your ‘thirty six
views of Mt. Fuji’
now you surprise me
on my calendar for April
with a print of poppies
the flowers are paper party-cups
folded on themselves
or flattened wide by a wind
springing the seams of things
in whole fields
open to the new season
That’s why I look at
my mother and her sister
in a snapshot
on a city street in Sydney
at their eyes on the photographer
their smiles and their hats
the bunched violets on my mother’s lapel
and my aunt’s cape
flaring on her shoulders
they dare their happiness
as if they were young and without care –
looking good
they might have said of themselves –
and why I stare at my orchids
my white ‘butterfly’ phaleonopsis
my dendrobium purples that arch out
into the room
and then turn to look outside
at the lemon-scented gum
rising, a casuarina going up even higher
and then back again to gaze
at a grevillea – the way
it crowds the balcony with a branched extension –
its tiny flowers spray-brushing the rail
Hokusai, because of your print of poppies
I look around at these things
for a joy to match yours
Tuesday 24th April 2007
For the rain it raineth everyday
today’s rain is falling
landing on leaves on roofs on
whatever catches it first –
it’s as steady as the air
it drops through –
at one or two almost-stopping points
you can hear the run of it
over the ground
where it puddles and leaks into holes
At an attention of waiting for its last
or next to last tick
my ears can’t help but measure it
Expectancy – as it’s still
unable to be tightened into silence –
doesn’t let me escape either
from your stress
your turning away
from what I can only think to myself
you don’t need to feel…
Basho’s frog croaks
in the half-quiet
the sound of my voice can’t repeat
adequate replies to you –
the rain a mirror to everything
comes back
as if it’s shining a night-light at itself –
there’s a lane of echoes
opening and closing
only the frog’s joking note
can hop away