I am hardly aware of my heel
slipping
back into a yielding crevice in the grass,
and for a drowsy moment,
don’t really see or understand the writhing
funnel
of yellow and black
rising into the air behind me;
I am too slow –
lulled by the sweetness of the meadow,
by the pleasing dryness of the clothes.

Only one yellow jacket
stings me –
I suppose this is luck –
on the underside of my wrist,
beneath my watch buckle –
and, as in some dreadful movie,
suddenly
I am running,
hoping to outrun them,
behind the screen door
            slamming
washing abandoned to the
damp of evening.

Pain
leaves a scoured,
scarred and hollow place
deep in the cellars
of memory;
an illegible space,
it is usually
impervious to the ordinariness
of life,
to the bringing in of the washing,
late in the summer:

only here –
as I hold ice against my wrist,
stomach heaving,
while this concentrated
           yellow and blackness,
this fury of a yellow jacket,
pours
into skin, into cells,
as my hand and forearm swell
and redden –
does something in my body
begin to recall,
to tap out
pain’s half-forgotten code –
though still too overwhelming,
            too vertiginous,
to wield into a simple word –

here. write this down,
remember, this blur of wrist –
           specific, my hand, my
forearm, throbbing –
and a swarming cloud of outraged
wasps,
this provoking,
swamping
hum of speech –

Rose Lucas

Lost Property

To be alone in the wide room
in the house’s crooked elbow, turning point
for extensions as the family grew
and grew – and grew – to be alone in the one room
nobody needed now, though it might be resumed
like land, for guests or blow-ins, at any moment,
without notice (and that was part of
the appeal, the very tenuous feel of the place) to play there
at five or six: to be immersed though not safe among the things
that preceded you, immediate and limitless,
everything already there, the way the world went on
before you were thought of, that flux, and your small-child
leisure for introspection while others shinnied trees for the same
sense of endless outlook, here,
in this would-be attic brought down to earth, whose breath
was frosty as Mother Shipton’s well, holding the tossed refuse
of older siblings, stages shrugged off: limp tutus, pink as dropped
gum blossom, too big, though you stepped
into them and stood, as if in a fairy ring you might animate;
satin and tapshoes, toe-shoes from a sister’s long gone bit-part
in Hans Christian Andersen, poems called Off The Shelf
that you avidly grabbed for your own, puzzled
at faded marginal doodles in real ink;
dark ocarina whose holes you could never master,
bakelite cracked, spookily fake-organic,
as if a new kind of reptile had laid it,
and a distant, shadowy instrument, lipped, where fingers should sit,
with verdigris your father later chastised you for rubbing –
an oboe perhaps – resisting your grip, but venting
a slow corruption in you as descant,
its distant kin in this vast orchestral silence:
strange octagon you toyed with that would never quite close or open,
squeeze box, little lung resisting pressure, push and draw, your hands
impeded from fully parting or meeting, stretching
in musical secretion, cat’s cradle, ectoplasm,
crimped membrane so vulnerable to puncture,
it made you wince, lantern-thin but giving sound
for illumination. At last: harmonica, cupped, bracketed but not
for all that an afterthought, heart of the whole unpeopled
space, for the way it moulded to your own small wheeze
and gave it a different life, if a pleasure to the player only,
pleasure to make your mouth water, metal, felt, and papery
velvet, though your brother might shudder
at the old spit he imagined pooled there,
to you it was honeycomb,
striving to isolate each note, then giving up,
as if you had many voices at once, speaking in chords,
and could make yourself heard.

Tracy Ryan

The Dark Zone

Sassafras Creek burbles along its course,
scrapping with sticks and stones,
eddying about the ankles of children.
We set up camp on its bank,
breaking five tent pegs in the pitch;
summer earth won’t forgive.
My son plucks up his courage
and joins some boys’ ball game,
aware of the shape our family isn’t.

Then you arrive in your hatchback
and unfold like a circus,
squeezing into the last site
right beside us: three children,
tent, stove, camping table-and-chairs.
You set up your big top in the dark;
voices and laughter close by are a comfort.

Sassafras Creek keeps me awake all night,
till my skull is a cave,
made by running, dripping water.
Are we having fun yet? l ask my son.
He says, Got to have vitamin F.

Rugged up for the constant below-ground temperature,
our families meet outside Marakoopa Cave.
Soon, your tears tell the story of a loved husband
some years dead, how every anniversary
you place a wreath at those traffic lights,
and wonder if the truck driver
also remembers, also returns.
You say, It makes me sad to go camping.
But I promised myself I’d take the children.

We have entered karst country,
hollowed beneath us
like the skulls of seals,
all sinus crevice and scrape;
it is a honeycomb of cavities.
If we walk out into the bush
our feet will stumble in saucer-shaped dolines,
sweet-sounding depressions of collapsed limestone.
Sinkholes disguise themselves as lakes.
The ground we tread is far from solid.

Speleothems: formations of calcite,
but the word sounds like champagne flutes.
Beside stalactites and stalagmites,
helicites grow sideways, twisting;
there are shawls and flowstones:

it is impossible to know
how anything will turn out.
We practise old mnemonics about ceiling
and ground, hear new ones
to do with tights falling down.
My son wants to take the lead from our guide,
and enter each cavern first.
Only when she turns off lights
and we experience pure darkness
does he change his mind.
We can’t see a hand in front of our face;
it’s like not existing.

Glow worms glow, as they do, in their dark.
We learn about cave spiders
below the spark of their stomachs,
how creatures adapt to a lack of light.
It is not necessary to have eyes at all
if everything is dark, so the eyes have gone.
If there was light, I would glance across at you.

I ask if the caverns have romantic names
like those I remember from Japan –
ceiling of an umbrella shop,
den of the dragon’s teeth –
but, no, post-modern has gone underground;
science prevails.
There were such names,
but everyone’s forgotten.
A single drop of water falls as we watch,
scattering minute particles of calcite.
Time is visible – this moment
the beginning of aeons.

Thoreau said a lake is the eye of the earth;
this cave is the ear
with its long canal and cavities,
its coiling intricacy.
It has heard another tale of grief,
carried it away into the dark zone.

Emergence into light is hard
now we know the marvel of this hidden realm.
My friend has held a key to the cave for months,
like a sorceress; she knows
this entering. this leaving.
Its rebirth, she tells me,
from the womb of earth.
The thing is, that’s how it feels.

If super-colliders are the new cathedral,
I’d rather worship in these catacombs,
sacrificing anything I can think of,
with the certain knowledge that Earth
has formed us, and made us who we are;
it is earth we’ll become.

The next time we meet – in a theatre –
it is also dark. You are playing cello.
When the lights come up
you smile straight at me.

                Kathryn Lomer

The Storm Glass

 I.         Forecast

And if, after all this time, soft rain comes in
after the fashion of junk mail, intimate because
it does not know you –
            In a Storm Glass, crystals
            with the exactness peculiar to foreboding
            make neural flare shapes:
            ultrasound coloured filaments crosshatched with blank, as of
            sensation excised and here, preserved in light.

            It is tomorrow’s weather
            haunting a small room. Clouds, which hurry for no one,
            which, amassing, betoken
            that undifferentiated grudge some call ambition,
            here confide motive without gesture

            As if to say There is
            another world. It is in this one, this scaled glass,
            structure of feeling in place of thought,
            where images fold into images the way a child disappears
            into the film in which she plays herself.

And when it comes, this soil sell rain,
think of it as small print, falling over
all that you would buy –

II.       The Weather Book

But your body long on the bed, flesh
magicked to lifelike; through a pulled blind, light
enamelling equally your eyes and –
            In a Storm Glass, crystals
            propagate upon a point of light
            divisions so fine
            as to be speculative: a backlit treasury of scruples,
            hermetically sealed.

            It makes an icon of patience –
            not as ships in bottles, rigged
            tricks of possibility,
            but that experience be forfeit to this
            illuminated scene

            As if to say She spent
            her whole life trying to haunt the future:
            an infinite of loss
            closed in the glass, making and unmaking its alike
            uninhabitable palaces –

this slump of fingers on the sheet, dear Replica
            (and are you gone,
uncompanioned. into the eyeless
air and profitlessly everywhere?)
            still in the light that returns to light
and is not changed.

                                                                        Lisa Gorton

The Reed Pen
For Bede at eleven days

At eleven days
my son does not know river.
Even the window-light is too much,
the way he squeezes his lids tightly
shut from it; flinching
from this second birth,
this time into blue
into a sky he cannot touch
but that meets the edges of all things,
pressing itself to both hill and rooftop
while at the same time stretching
away from him
until clouds shrink smaller and smaller
through its wideness
and birds seem to wither to moths
in the flown distance to nightfall.

My son sleeps in his basket
while at the river’s edge
the dried pokers of bulrushes bend
with the sway of grass
and frogs croak in the thicket,
spawning from their singing
a hundred black eggs into the water.
It’s here my husband crouches,
treading watercress and clover.
Here, where the willow at dusk
is not enough,
nor his own self portrait
rippling to pieces
on the water’s surface,
that he comes to craft a pen
for drawing;
to flay the husk of a reed
to smoothness,
carve an arrow end of nib,
hollow pith
from the fluted mouth of reed
to hold ink in place of water.

At eleven days my son
does not know river.
Cannot yet imagine a body of water
that can carry a baby in its swell,
suspend him, once again,
uncribbed and weightless.
He does not recognise the river
on his father’s body
when he returns home,
not the sweetness
of trodden grass and pollens,
or the watermarked line of silt
at the bottom of his trousers
where he waded in without him.
He does not see that his father
kneels beside him
holding the reed pen
drawing his little clenched fist.
He sees only ringed-light,
as if swimming underwater
with eyes open
towards the surface of breath.

Away from the river,
the reed pen spills blue
into a landscape of whiteness
pulled by neither wind nor current,
but a love outside of itself
that births the same blue fist
onto paper over and over again.
It has seen a tadpole grow legs,
leap out of water to mud,
but not this; not a reed
flowering hands in winter.
It must remember the river
if it is to stay reed. And so it does,
pulling the river towards the page,
emptying it into these hands
the way he knows water
can be cupped.

In every direction
the reed draws what it remembers;
the purl and ripple of water in rainfall,
the chase of wren and dragonfly
hooping through rushes.
And when it has finished,
when the last line
jags and cuts
along the speckled shell of an egg
to hatch a waterfowl.
the reed rests.
bleeding from the nib
onto the drawing of my son’s hand
so that it seems as if he
has been lowered from his crib
into river,
grown filaments of root,
then fledged again
into sky –
waterborn.

                                                Angela Malone

The Aquarium

The weirdest things are the tiny cuttlefish,
the ones whose translucent, gelatinous faces
                                  are hung with the rippling curtains
of their feeding tentacles. Their locomotion-frills are wafting too,
            fine as chiffon.
The sign says there’s a stonefish in this tank,
                       though you can barely see it
covered with the rocky ornamentations, with the green and lilac
                       encrustations of the pool itself.
Now a jellyfish pulses by. I can see four white gonads
            through the body-wall.
This one’s trailing-filaments end in large purple knobs.
I imagine holding a jellyfish
would take a cosmetic surgeon’s steady hands,
                                                someone used to manoeuvring
the wobbly sacs of breast implants.

This tank is as glossy and bright as a brochure
                                                            of a temperate rocky shore.
It’s full of anemones whose tentacles suddenly flare
around the perimeters of their mouths
            with the supple, progressive case of Mexican waves.
The tentacles radiate out in rows
as though they were circles
                                                of colourful, feeding fish.
These sea urchins are as scarlet and as prickly as rambutans,
there are so many, I feel as though I’m peering into the hollow
                       in a wave-swept reef.
A spotted pipefish drifts out of a hole
                                    and for a moment
looks like a stray strand of kelp or eelgrass you sometimes see
wound through the links of old boat chains.
                        The tank is also full of skates, stingrays,
eagle rays, stingarees. I watch their edges undulate
            with all the yielding tonicity of mollified rubber
                                                             as they sweep around the glass.
This skate looks as thick and broad as a tropical leaf;
            this one’s edges swirl and fan out as if the tank-water
were being pumped with the submerged, weighted rhythms
                                                 of cello, oboe
                         and the slow thrumming of a lyre.
On its underside, this stingray has two dark spiracles
and deep gill-slits set in its bright white skin.
It could almost be a ghost floating around a cold, wide ceiling
            with that quadrangular disc-shape
                       changing, fading away almost to nothing at the edges.

Two turtles are swimming together
                                                           and suddenly I remember:
Tile dance was slow, was slow, was slow. Slow was tile dance, very.
Tile dancer turned, her arms held out as she came close, slowly.
An eel projects its long-tubed nostrils out of a crevice.
Its head is thin, compressed, swollen
                                                 behind the eyes.
I step back when it unrolls across the glass like a stocking-full of slime.

Now blue-finned leatherjackets, big-eye trevally, candy wrasse,
painted anglerfish, grouper and rock whiting do another circuit of the tank.
            Their pictures are displayed around the perimeter
like mugshots of fleshy-lipped, thick-browed thugs.
A small fortune of aqua light is falling into the tank, making it glow
like a milky sapphire, like mother-of-pearl.

In the next tank I watch an octopus luxuriate in its own arms,
then languidly roll them around itself as if it were looking
                                               for a loophole,
                       then it loosely lets them out
far beyond its head and mantle, each arm moving as though it had
            taken up a quill
and were writing over and over in slanting, looping letters:
                         lollygag, lollipop, lollapalooza
on the tank-water, on the pebbles and the rising stream of bubbles.

Down the ramp there is a pool of seals
and one has worked its way onto the platform where later it will perform
by keeping a ball balanced on its nose
                                               while clapping its flippers;
from here it looks as shiny as a piece of sculpted tourmaline.

I walk to the next tank and watch a platoon of cruising
                       gummy sharks. A mass of aerating bubbles
is pouring like a small Milky Way over their backs as they slide
    up to the surface – they do not know about the length
            of purchase the bubbles, sand. or glass
will have on their days. A grey nurse shark glides forward
            with an air of absolutism.
Its mouth seems a fortification, a compound. It commands
its regiment of fins, but looks so unreal, lifeless,
as though it were made of fibreglass. or some seamless,
            polished plastic.

I go back to watch the octopus again whose arms now
seem to be conducting music to four distinct orchestras.
            Then it plays with one of the small rings put there for its amusement –
                       and in a flash
            as though it were a length of voile or Dacca silk, it draws
all four meters of itself through the ring’s small hole
                       shape-shifting then tightening
            its small face against the glass before it holds the rim
of the ring again, and it draws itself back through
            as if into another portal, another hole in space.

NB: The quoted lines are the first stanza of James Galvin’s poem ‘Girl without Her Nightgown’ published in The Best American Poetry 2008, ed. by Charles Wright, Scribner Poetry, New York, 2008, p. 37.

But even after this, it’s that shark I can’t forget –
            how its eyes keep staring, colder than time – how it never
                       stops swimming,
                                    how it never closes its mouth.

                                                            Judith Beveridge