States of Poetry ACT Poems
Mark, Pauline and Me
1970
John Foulcher
...Theft
The maps that teased my childhood were silent.
The imagination they cosseted
was of no use. Instead of song
there was a flatness, a sheet of pastel shades.
I could find Peru, but not food.
And these maps were my inheritance.
Maps can be owned. Land is something else.
Maps can be stolen. When the atlas claps shut
those who ...
Graces Road
Rise above it, my mother used to say,
and now she's old, she herself is something I must rise above.
Just now, to separate myself, I turned and drove,
and finding Graces Road, followed its name
upwards to paddocks that a summer of scant rain
had worked into yellow and m ...
Atonement
I
This clutch of buildings
has long died
but the ghosts are still here
trying to find heartbeats.
We need to lie
the mirrors down
and take a hammer
to them.
Make a mandala
out of all this
scratched
and crazed glass.
This place needs
to be blessed
before the ghosts reach
On World Heart Day
I notice your scars more than usual -
life-saving stuck zippers.
I want to plant kisses
like votives along each one:
along the delicate ribbon of light
between your extroverted nipples,
along the scythe shaped slash
de-freckling your right calf.
Hospital flowers bloomed, petals fell
in the sterile-fresh air th ...
Avila
(1)
The badly wounded and the poor
Move round the city with the sun
And little else to keep them warm,
While time softens cathedral stone,
Plucks eagles bald and breaks the wings
Of St Teresa's doves in flight.
(2)
A fine day shows up broken teeth,
Club feet, ten thumbs and squinti ...
Distance
(after Jordie Albiston’s ‘Cartography’)
What is the space between this hut and that mountain
but impenetrable black, and frosty cold.
She is writing this at a table in the cabin,
spinning thoughts like threads, as if they can hold
her boys tighter, pull the mountain in, with their bold
tents blooming like flowe ...
Waking
Note the passive voice in that last line,
the denial implied. ‘People were shipped out.’
The agent with a conscious brain linked
to a hand with a pen or a gun felt his own grip
all along the neural pathways.
Some noises we can sleep through
but even the softest can be an alarm.
Sailboats in the calmest water are still not ...
The Undiscovered Country
tears itself from its own body
Minos condemns it to the seventh abyss.
wherever Fortune casts it, and there
it germinates, like a dropped grain of spelt.
...
The leaves here are not green, ...
After Reming
Super typhoon 2006
‘Purple.
Unlike any that I’ve seen,’
Mother says.
‘Behind an iron gate
beside an immense hole
on the ground,
but no house.’
She pauses,
and I’m suddenly
beside the purple
behind the gate
in the hole
in the house,
led by the definite article,
thus defini ...