Poetry Archives | Page 2 of 3 | Giramondo Publishing

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Poetry

The literary world prefers its daytime rose, / sweet and thorny, seasonal, blown. / You open only at night, on the ledge, / stepping from your continent’s shelf / like Houdini on a tightrope, flesh tensed, / gazing in all directions at once / like Titian’s triple portrait beasts, / or your own words, pointing and warning.

Dodo / Okay, so we’re famous for all the wrong reasons, / Our ancestors shed their energy expense & settled / On Mauritius – selection did the rest & our wings / Pared back. Portuguese found us, forest dwelling.

I haven’t really seen it, Caravaggio’s / Death of…but the saint holds his neck / with his right hand, his forehead / with the left / and it really is the dumbfoundedness of mourning.

I think: the sugar’s hit the brain / when she’s finished / she slurps the rest of her tea / and says / ‘australians only believe in fark’ / ‘what?’ / ‘you know, fark – that’s all they say around here: / fark fark fark why do they have to say / that / all the time for?

On ‘Sticky Bread Gets Sliced’ by Jackson Mac Low

In ‘Sticky Bread Gets Sliced’, the space of the page becomes receptive, vibrant, like a ‘sticky decomposition web’ perhaps, where words, images, sounds lodge.

Sticky decomposition web riparian cacti’s vulnerable pollen / nothing-disconnécted crowned with magenta really swimming in meaning

Photographs / The past / a drink, a coolness / we thirst for. / The past / a drink, a poison / we thirst for.

What John Donne Would Say / Nowhere to purchase and nothing to defend, / nothing but malls as thin as morning dew / unrolling each morning each roller door anew / and burned by the glory of Commerce without End.

peerage / his body a paradigm / of tattoo husbandry he / glowers on the street dreaming / himself to be an award / winning website hawks

She said to him, When a woman informs you that she’s a little drunk / this is actually a warning that she’s liable to collapse at any moment. / And when she tells you of a lost happiness / she means that you’re responsible for giving it back to her / on a silver platter, like those knights in the stories of Caliphs / who return home with the heads of enemies on their spears.

my understanding of a nation is not abstract/ if america did not let off Ezra Pound/ it would not tolerate me/ no! I am not satisfied with my own country/ but that does not mean that I shall love america

standing under the ex-wife’s house concrete pillars covered in / the hieroglyphics of grubby little hands pieces of antique chairs hang / that we had planned to restore together arm-rests of that old coach,

I was writing a long and labyrinthine poem in which I opened up / and at the same time stepped into that openness, stillness, with a white voice

Nobody in Rome cares / that I have begun / to devour you. / In the hostel this morning / and again tonight. / Even on the basilica stairs / while the nuns pray inside.

All night my father hangs upside down / in the hospital basement / trapped under the huge pulsing bell / of a crystal jellyfish...

Four poems – ‘Pied Butcher Bird Flute Solo’, ‘Brush Turkey In the Cold Room’, ‘Death of a Cat’, and ‘Praise and Its Shadow’ – by Robert Adamson, a poet of the Hawkesbury River.

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