States of Poetry

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 flowers in the snow.
Can thoughts, or mad desire, shift the world
slightly, tilt ranges so their faces lower

to her own? Upthrust, tectonic forces, the whole slew
of geology sped up, so contour lines diminish
and lakes freeze, ice thickening to a deep blue
while those dark mountain peaks relinquish

distance; and this long night will finish.
Her writing is a thread to lure them back,
their faces filled with snow light, dolerite, the itch
of time alone, the cold breath of height. Face facts:

the contours between here and there are shifting. Pack,
and ask, what is the space between home and out there,
between their beginnings and these beginnings, but a lack
of courage; what is distance but a prayer?

Adrienne Eberhard

Voyaging

I          Marie Antoinette, imprisoned in Paris in 1791,
           to Marie Louise (Louis) Girardin,
           departing from Brest on d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition

Your breasts, small as flowers, lie flat,
unlike the ocean’s endless swells.
Tell me of the constant rising, the blue days
that stretch to months. Minutes spool
to hours here, and I’m a fool,
my mind unruly as a child’s.

Your breasts oppressed with weight
of jacket, shirt, wool and linen,
lie hidden from the prying eyes of men.
I imagine you, collar tight, buttoned in bone,
your shirt white as skin. At night, alone,
do you bare your chest to the cool air?

My breasts, pale and shrunken,
are hampered too. I wrap them
in a winding sheet, build
a man’s facade to face the fray.
Abundant, blossoming, once they
inspired vessels in which milk nestled:

my breasts, moulded in pale porcelain,
the cup an aching memory.
Wanton moths bang their bodies
on glass panes. I loved those cups,
fragile as moonlight,
the stain the milk left, like a ruff of silk.

Your breasts, your woman’s body
tied and taped into trousers and shirt.
Your hurt etched in your face.
The ocean reaching its blue arms,
wrapping them around you,
holding tight, through the long, long nights.

My breasts, my woman’s body,
tired and trapped in a world gone wild.
Are you beguiled, like me, by moths, their wings
a prayer to lift you, their bodies burning with light?
I watch them and remember summer nights when I
spilled from dresses, creamy and abundant as milk.

II Marie Louise (Louis) Girardin to Marie Antoinette

the sea a blue furling tightly bound the sheets the cords strapped and straining the ache the creak the holdfast as we left the shore behind chaos and an infinite sky the wind a benefactor its breath our battlefield the spilling of fear we were awash with rain and sea it drummed on our skin setting it alight with liquid the sky streaming screaming haunted by bird call by the wind lifting its throat widening its jaws its shifting embrace a body blow that blasted the world asunder the past a mockery a flawed thing with burnt claws the present an unknown our performers’ wigs askew voices deep as earth’s bowels the rain a cloak a hiding place his tears my tears washing changing charging all air alive and skin streaming the ship a chess piece moving step by step towards release unease lifting the world firmer despite its watery foundations my shirt sleeves soft against this toughening skin this body a chrysalis from which I inch slow sure steady the astonishing blue a gleam in an eye the sea aglow the sea a blue unfurling

Adrienne Eberhard

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
breaking point.

We need to mend things.

II

The Beauty of Numbers

On a corner wall of The Barracks
a breakout of numbers
in a sequence of threes and fours
makes no sense
to a maths professor
or an archaeologist –
no one is able to unravel
and decode.

But for someone who saw
the world in fragments,
and had a fixation on digits
finding a wall in this hollow square
of a building complex
and pencilling onto the rendered bricks
the first line
1068, 3241, 3128 and 2620
makes perfect sense.

Whether by brilliance or madness
the author of this
mega puzzle of figures
from the soldier’s nook on the roof
down into this corner
of the former barracks
perhaps had only one aim–

the beauty of the numbers
themselves.

III

Why Graffiti?
Graffiti writers are urban shamans
and the streets are our modern day caves. Crayone.

I’m a modern day
calligrapher
writing text
most people can’t read.

Writing my name
over and over again
in public places
makes me feel immortal.

It’s a beautiful thing
when I rip the lid
off a spray can
and smell the fresh paint.

When I take on a wall
and do a throwie
I see a new world
in the loudest colours.

It’s a kick in the face
to other gangs
who try to take over
my turf.

Love the rush
of quick bombings
the sacrificial speed
over aesthetics.

There’s lots of long-faced
walls around here.
I have no choice
but to leave my mark.

IV

All is not lost

When the delinquents put
an end to the greenhouse
with their riotous supply of bricks
detached seedlings flew out
in the beaks of birds
and garden snails found
a new way to crawl over
this stretch of glass beach.

V

The Garden

Against a tight girdle
of brickwork, weeds
have burrowed deep
into the down-and-out
soil.

This was once a garden
of fast growing flowers
planted by a groundskeeper
for the queer folk to watch
from the whey-faced windows.

They would stare
open-mouthed and point
to the sunflowers
growing their big, meaty
heads.

And the groundskeeper
instead of waving, would drag
out dandelion roots
and blow feathery seeds
their way.

VI

Missing

Like a man
with a metal detector
he fossicks
through the rubble
of crumbling walls
and stone
in search
of his memory
gone astray
after the asylum
he once lived in
tumbled down.

VII

The art of breaking free

Find an open shed
star-high with tools
and a golden ladder
that will reach the top
of a maximum security wall.

As you climb each rung
don’t listen to the bricks
and their sad history
the willow trees are waiting
for you on the other side.

When you cross
the bridge
don’t look down
at the troubled river

don’t dwell on
the lifers
you leave behind.

Karen Knight

Woman in Bath

after Brett Whiteley’s Woman in Bath (1964)

There was fog on the windows,
inside and out.
She wound her hair into a bun
and eased into the shallow water.
I stood in the doorway, squinting.
                                          I wanted her
curled into that ceramic curve
like an embryo in the shell.
I stood, squatted, paced about
and stood again at the door, deciding
what to give her and what to take away.
                           The head I’d reduce
to a dented ellipse, tender as a crowning baby’s.
Over the M of her raised knees I’d order an accident,
a blessing and violation: the showerhead
became a crescent moon that creamed
the wine-red cloth I’d placed between her legs;
                                        behind her back
a pair of voyeur taps in housecoat blue.
I’ve captured something of the foetal bird
in the angle of the neck, a subdued alignment
of head and shoulder. Her breasts I figured
full and solid, a nipple hardening
beneath her arm.
                             And for the limbs I thank
Modigliani: buttery dough rolled thin.
I could push them through my fingers.
She kicked out one cramped leg,
swung her haunches to the other side.
                                         I got that right –
the movement she’d just made
and the one she’d yet to make. Later
I painted the living daylights out of the walls
till they were flat and still as the lake at Sigean.
She lifted her chin. You still there, Brett?
I’m freezing my tits off in here!
In art alone I could becalm us.

Louise Oxley

Flower

(Montignac)

She sees the flowers are red flags
like pennants hauled up, heralding danger,
hailing the world and its lovers
with admonitions:
watch out, watch out.

On long stalks they wobble
and wave, handkerchiefs flaring
long after the ship has left port,
their scarlet hue a constancy,
an accusation,
each flower, proud,

a finger pointing,
away, away
and beckoning,
come back, come back.

At their base, sun pours
through leaves, shafts of light
like stained glass,
veins etched lead solder.

One stem rises in a separate salute,
its arc empty of flowers,
green hasps like tiny medieval chalices.
They cast shadows on the table,
love hearts, all of them.

Adrienne Eberhard

Bill And Gwen

In Swiftian mood, insisting that
The human race would never learn,
Was hopeless, doomed, Bill Harwood, pure
Logician and philosopher,
As well as spouse of poet Gwen,

Proposed a universal ban
On sex to end our sorry ways
And brought our threesome's talk on how
The world was going to a halt
Of the socially awkward kind.

Then magically, as tension grew,
As though specifically she knew
This impasse would arise, she whipped
A book up from her lap and showed,
Spread open at the very page,

A photo of a rationalist
And his divinely inspired wife,
Of Abelard and Heloise,
Their mediaeval counterparts
As sculpted on a column in

The Conciergerie, Paris,
His castrated parts cupped by her
Protectively as in a nest,
Their stooped backs turned forever on
Each other in a bed of stone.

Graeme Hetherington

Learning To Know One's Place

(For Gwen Harwood And James McAuley)

'Hello Graeme, old love, it's Gwen,
I'm sitting on a cloud too fine
For jealousy to let you see.
But please believe your ears as I

Exhort you not to bow to age,
To keep tramping around in search
Of at least one poem that will be
As sure of fame as all mine are.

There's still life in your Hell's Gate's, West
Coast of Tasmania being that's
Done well despite the limits of
Its origins encumbering you,

The baggage you can't shed to fly
As high as I have done, or Jim,
Who sits upon the right hand side
Of you-know-who and sends his love'.

Graeme Hetherington

For Bill Harwood

A theorist of the purest kind,
Your lectures had no human warmth
And faded like a day-time moon.
The crueller said 'cloud-cuckoo land'

And loudly tapped their hollow heads.
Some thought you clinically disposed,
Contemptuous of eveything
Except the symbols on a page,

Myself included till you said
With gravy running down your chin:
'I love to lie curled up in bed
And listen to the pouring rain'.

Graeme Hetherington

Upper Heights And Lower Depths

What heights remain beyond our reach
When dog whistle and tuning fork,
Straining to listen though we may,

Sound notes pitched too high for our ear,
Deserting us yearning to rise,
Freed from the confines of our lives?

Nor can we hear how far below
The scales a crow's cawing might go,
Summoning to a fathomless

Black abyss, as Aeschylus in
His tragedies, at first much too
Profound to be understood with

Such measurelessly dark deep lines
As 'cry sorrow, yet let the good
Prevail, man suffers to grow wise',

Sang the ever-feuding Greeks down
Into the bottomless pit of
A vendetta, till all but drowned

In blood they learnt it's better to,
With many a backward look and fall,
Climb out and up towards the stars.

Graeme Hetherington

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 squinting eyes,
The signs of under-privileged genes.
Such people built the city walls,

Served church and king in countless wars.
The past has much to answer for
When sunlight's only kind to stained
Glass windows and bejewelled swords.

Graeme Hetherington

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 that day.

I wove endearments like chainmail
across the terrible divide

as miracle drugs fought to save you,
leaving demons in their wake.

Somewhere in your addled brain
a small piece of trust remained

and you gave it to me -
love’s indefatigable radar homing in.

That first night home we read
Postoperative Delirium over beer

and ice cream the way we once
read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

With no more to wish for we fell asleep
to the tick of your tin man heart.

But they cracked open your breast bone
and I cannot think too long on this.

The pressure it took. The precision.
The stillness of your heart and lungs.

The machine that breathed for you.
The one that brightened your blood.

And the tunnel, that anecdotal tunnel
you say you never saw coming

returning you to me like fortune,
my light-scarred Lazarus love.

Jane Williams

Part of the main

is what Donne wrote when he wrote about men
not being islands and what I’d been thinking
when my friend posted the photo.

Our Lady Help of Christians, Grade 1 -
thirty five six year olds in pigeon grey
with a hint of ascension blue.

Those faces exactly as I remember them -
crushed or beaming, self contained, apologetic,
all burgeoning with mimicry and invention:

the bully, the nanny, the comic relief,
smooth talking con artist, nail biting altruist -
each praying for some kind of fit.

Singing when we thought no one could hear,
inflating fraught hearts until we were sure
there was no more to life than this floating.

Private wish lists and secret codes, our world
internal, eternal, by invitation only,
the bright guileless day dreams, the terrors of night.

It was the year Janis followed Jimmy all the way
down and out and the Vietnam birthday ballot
drew Australian names like bad pennies to war,

the year our parents took to shaking or hanging
their heads, looking at us, just looking at us in ways
we had to trust but couldn’t begin to understand.

Jane Williams

Swallowing the sky

What can I say about this
spring day but that the leaping
dog cloud has stolen my attention
away from all earthly blooms.
Such fine points of ears,
legs built for speed, for the hunt,
tail set to thump nothing into being,
open jawed, tasting life on the hop.
Yet even as this poem takes shape,
its inevitable dissolve has begun:
a quiver in the back legs then the front,
a reluctant heel to domesticity,
the ears next, nibbled away
by some cunningly
camouflaged predator,
the tail unceremoniously
dropping off altogether
until finally all that remains
is the ever widening
sky swallowing jaw
of the leaping dog cloud
no more.

Jane Williams

The insistence of now

An almost-noir chill day in the cemetery.

A service just finishing, no one I knew.
I walk the line - observer/interloper,
drawn to incongruities, ambiguities.

The way graveside life teems - regardless,
causal. A priest walks by swinging
his thurible, black robes, black puffer jacket.

A child forages tidbits from a mother’s pocket.

An intermittent breeze flaps
the canary yellow tie of a mourner
becomes a metaphor: identity, freedom,
inarticulate love.

The mountaintop an expo of spring snow.

A ginger cat plays hide-and-go-seek
with patches of light and shadow and
me.

Daisies cover names and dates insisting now.

A pine tree severed to its stump, the fresh
cut scent intoxicating and guilt-ridden
as any pheromone.

Amoung the rows of marble and granite
a stop-red For Sale sign advertising
its vacant plot
three tiers, a mobile phone number.

All this cordoning off, alphabetizing
unsustainable degrees of separation.

Beneath our feet the herculean ants carry on.

Above us plovers swoop miss swoop again.

In the rising bark of bitzer dogs all our unchecked
daydreams off lead, indistinguishable, giving chase ...

Jane Williams

Casualties

(Willow Court Asylum, 1827-2000, New Norfolk, Tasmania)

Squatting in the bitumen
by the old mortuary
suckering weeds
of blackberry.

Around the hem
of the exercise yard
runtish holly.

Under the scum and stench
of the Frescati pond
rotting water ribbons
and frogs.

An ash sapling
tunnelling too far
is trapped in the pipeline.

Wisteria and ivy
in a race to the high wall
have growth-spurted
through the fire escape.

A solitary elm
scrooches down
in the empty avenue.

Lombardy pine
has surrendered
its heartwood
to a colony of bees.

A laurel has died
but the earth holds fast
to its mouldering roots.

The golden robinia
has lost its vitals –
creamy pea flowers
kidney seeds.

Man-fern
has closed its fronds
to the light.

At death’s terminus
a palliative cocktail awaits
contorted willow, alder
and oak.

Tree of Heaven, 14. 5 metres high
watches over a funeral cypress
with ruin on its mind.

Karen Knight

Winter

Snow laced the lower slopes
of the mountain today, trees
hooked to filigrees of light,
sky tethered to the mountain’s bulk,
its table cloth of white.
Possibility was everywhere,
the embroidery of snow, illuminating.
Out of the corners of our eyes we spied
our own footsteps like animal spoor,
faintly articulated in the white blanket,
a trail to chase, all day.

Adrienne Eberhard

Where am I?

I am desperate for connection.
I must have hit a black spot.
The sun is glaring at me and blinding
my display screen.
All I can see is my own face.
Coarse sand has crept between my toes.
I have wandered too far.
I need to google a map, text someone
who will reconnect me.
This shell, this sand, the smell of rotting kelp.
I poke at dead things with pieces of driftwood.
This strange salty wind, seagulls and whale lookout.
How can a message washed up in an old bottle
compare to my new slate black iPhone?

Karen Knight

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 mauve.
Someone who had loved
this arc of land had turned things so its hay
could harvest the sun, and – who knows? – maybe
without forethought had named its road with a word
that drew me up like first light from grey
to yellow, then caught me in the whole half
circle of the day and removed
me, the dark hills around me like a sleeping herd.

Louise Oxley

Notes from the inland

When he goes into that country,
a man loses his thinking
Patrick Mung Mung

A tree opens
a crack in the landscape –

stars bolt from daybreak
and earth themselves in the underworld.

Look long enough
and creatures will emerge from the walls

to spin webs of coppery light
over tussock and spinifex,

cloud will rise and run
from the smouldering fire-stick

of the sun-woman,
long-eared bat will flap out of the gorge.

I will sit here
until the day’s last cockatoo has screeched,

sand frog has dug himself out
and sinks to his belly in a rockhole,

the moon-man has torched the hills
and taken back the stars

and I have held my tongue long enough
to lose the names

I have learned this country with

Louise Oxley

Reply from the Women of Tangier

after Brett Whiteley’s The Majestic Hotel, Tangier (1967)

So secretly together do we wear
our separateness, we’re so complete
he gives us the white stare.

Easy to see decay and disrepair
in the spittle and hashish-ruined streets.
But secretly together we all wear

our place and time, our rightness here,
our journey from antiquity.
He gives us the white stare

and calls us names: the Olive Mafia.
We hold our desert gaze, defeat
his envy, and secretly together bare

our hennaed hands, our loosened hair,
our thighs for marriage rites, our feet.
He gives us the white stare,

but cannot penetrate the haze, can’t bear
our vapour-of-midnight eyes, our heat.
So secretly together do we share
ourselves, he gives us the white stare.

Louise Oxley

Green Mountain (Fiji)

after Brett Whiteley’s The Green Mountain (Fiji) (1969)

The skyward pitch of the hill in its green glory
rising heavy and indolent as the knee of a woman
sunbathing in a sarong,
and the thigh that leads from this knee,
an emerald downswelling syncline,
end where the womb’s elastic triangle,
fronded and flowering, holds three
imperfectly white eggs,
expectant, fragile yet unbreakable
among a tumble of mellifluous treasures –
swollen sacs, pouches and bulges:
a ballooning Polynesian breast,
a giant scrotum of jackfruit,
an intestinal serpent –
all weighted with sunlight,
contented in their curvature
and insinuating themselves into paradise;
above this tumescent anatomy,
sent up from the nest like a dear wish
and stalled, a tracer hummingbird
peers down at the path she has taken,
as if to memorise its precise arc.
She will dart out and return
to warm her eggs again and again
or whirr away over the flank of Green Mountain
and be gone
at the bidding of the mind’s eye.

Louise Oxley

Window

What is the mind that would invent the lock?
What are the pathways of the brain
that must be followed with no ball of string
to arrive at a device
which excludes? Why would you start?

If this slab of the earth
was where you had always been,
there would be no entry point,
no threshold of distrust, only the base
ab origine home and whole.

Cook and Banks cased the place, reported back.
(This mob didn't do disorganised crime.)
'It is a place of curios if it is, at all,
a place.' The Enlightenment understood
locus in its richest meaning.

Meanwhile need, greed and curiosity
(those drivers of all crime)
were building against a coastline
that bound like straps. Something
(by Hegel!) had to give. Someone

had to go. The blue chasm had to
be bridged, the stormy lanes traversed,
the metaphors of danger maelstrom-mixed.
Easier than wriggling through a window
as it turned out, the landing was made.

Tim Thorne

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 swans,
not even, despite voyages and size,
albatrosses. This can only, however,

be a dream resurgent after eighteen years.
Too awake for anything but analysis,
a brain will cling in turmoil to whatever
rock of clarity presents. ‘This is not happening’
is not a valid option. Imagine:

not the slow comfort of waking
from nightmare but its opposite.
The colours of no apparent ceremony
covered not only skin but politics,
history. Most of all they hid the will to act.

Tim Thorne

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 are trapped between its pages
have no co-ordinates of place.

‘Grab and go’ is the usual way:
jewellery, cash, phones, then out and off.
It is different when what you take remains.
Too big to move and where would you put it?
And yet what can this be called but theft?

There were no trinkets to steal, no devices.
This was not mere burglary. What was taken
and sold came from the deep and mineral heart
of the place, of the premises.
It was a crime even to call it property.

Maps that are sung, that sing
in and through memory, that are not maps
but the land itself, that dance and are danced:
when these are gone the world has disappeared
and all its denizens are hollowed out.

Tim Thorne

On the Mountain

Here where clouds soothe rocks, high above commerce,
I could catalogue the sharper images
of evil but to what use? City tabloids
and browsers will unroll bandages
enough to wrap communal wounds.

The bardic robe sits ill. The mist suggests
the insubstantiality of wish.
Summon a future like some old romantic,
some wacko visionary? Too easy,
too absurd. The gesturing hand

needs to lose some knuckle skin,
get some dried blood under the nails,
learn the tendon patterns for fist
and begging bowl and when to use each.
'Redemption' has always been a hollow word.

Punishment was how this whole mess started:
the penal settlement as solution
became problem; so would they all,
even sovereignty. The facts
sit in the gut like stones or guilt.

Tim Thorne

Attack

And it is the act, the will
channeled through fibre to impact;
this is history as king hit.
Imagine your own bedroom as nullius,
adding extra dizziness to any fall.

If pain, as is said, cannot be remembered,
only the having been hurt,
then where does the pain belong
that comes out of the blue ocean
into a void? History as bruise?

Smashed capillaries will water the seed
of a dark plant for generations.
Behind the blow there is no reaching,
no plan. It is the immediacy,
the confined 'now', that is worse than the strength.

When the Age of Enlightenment
needs a burglar's flashlight and even then
can't see the future or the long, long past,
whose role is it to ask the questions?
Whose answers are to be heard?

All that can be known is the instant
of impact, the non-dimensional point,
and it is on this absence, out of it
the attempt was made to build a nation.
Jesus and the three little pigs knew better.

Tim Thorne

kangaroo grass

ramayana puppet
angled, spare

you gesture with sharp fingers
beckoning insistent

eloquent as a mime artist
nodding your body

to shadows in weak light
each seed head pared

you lure the breeze
tethering sky to earth

a binding
that is pure theatre

Adrienne Eberhard

Adrienne Eberhard 250 Adrienne Eberhard’s latest collection, The Shape of the Wind, is forthcoming from Black Pepper. Agamemnon’s Poppies (2003) was awarded second place in the Anne Elder Prize, Jane, Lady Franklin (2004) was featured on PoeticA, and This Woman (2011) was shortlisted for the 2013 Tasmania Book Prize. She lives on the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, south of Hobart, and is working on a new collection that is a series of poems/letters between Marie Antoinette and Marie Louise (Louis) Girardin, who sailed in Tasmanian waters in 1792–93.

States of Poetry Tasmania - Series One

Distance

Voyaging

Atonement

Woman in Bath

Flower

Bill And Gwen

Learning To Know One's Place

For Bill Harwood

Upper Heights And Lower Depths

Avila

On World Heart Day

Part of the main

Swallowing the sky

The insistence of now

Casualties

Winter

Where am I?

Graces Road

Notes from the inland

Reply from the Women of Tangier

Green Mountain (Fiji)

Window

Waking

Theft

On the Mountain

Attack

kangaroo grass

Recording

Further reading and links

States of Poetry

Recording

Further reading and links

States of Poetry

Recording

Further reading and links

States of Poetry

Recording

Further reading and links

States of Poetry

Recording

Further reading and links

States of Poetry

Recording

Further reading and links