with aching grace: the cusp where they stand,
splashes of buffalo, pot-bellied air,

the impressionist light. some spire in a nearby
church tolls its god, and in the corduroy silence

that follows, this join-the-dots man of me
forgets numbers, this seep of leaving

rooted in turn in the clear outline of these three
draws me towards them. having no need for eyes

I follow the scent of sweet decay,
let my soles find exposed pasts, and since

no one is around, I brush my cheek
across them, hold them, press my chest

against them, know their ribbed unknowns

Kevin Gillam

T/here

This is not a place for candles, or the scent of red cedar
gathered on a hill to burn, or native plum, lit at night
to hold the urgent dead at bay: you won’t wake to hear
the click of brumbies’ hooves on a road that flows
to where the humans are, or blink to see the mob
jittering in the dawn air:

                                       this is not a house

of language, in the first sense of the word, the one
in which it made the world, this is not a place of origin,
ground, or single source: this is not a road for drinking
in the middle of the night: you won’t see
the ink of fire moving night and day across
the blotting paper of savannah, or the scorched paperbark
raining through a reddened dusk:

                                                     and this is not a place

for gathering the raw fruits of the earth, or to learn
the names for lily root, honey, paperbark,
nor to hear the many uses
to which an axe gets put:

                for that is not a life

of plainness in the hope of life unending, nor a way

of being gentle on the earth.

                                            Here, you meet
no women keening for the death of only sons
on the lamplit urban roads, rock to skull, beating down
the dumb refusals of the mind:

                                                and this

is not a place for dreaming
on the memory of rocks, or to hear the rain that drops
as though a sea were in the sky, or watch erosion
on a scale both intimate
and eons wide.

From these walls I cannot read

the lineage of human lives.

Judith Bishop

Manyallaluk, NT; Sydney, NSW

a full stop reaches the end of its sentence

a full stop
never understands
the need to understand
what words are for

a full stop
feels it is superior
because it provides
meaning without letters

a full stop
does understand
its capacity to arouse
a body into silence

(into silence
into silence
into silence
walks a sleeping figure
a sleeping figure
with her necklace of full stops)

for obvious reasons a full stop’s favourite letter is i

a full stop has no desire to transgress its shape
a full stop is a self-incubating form
a full stop will float in water but not in blood

memories are in fact a transfusion of full stops

(full stops
have now replaced
have now replaced
are still replacing
still replacing
the sand
in the hourglass)

full stops colonise the reverse side of the mirror
full stops plot the continued downfall of words

full stops
can smell the lips of shadows
through a closed book

full stops
can be worked like fillings
into the teeth of language

full stops are sometimes set on fire
and dropped from a great height
onto the bare skin of an ending
on the odd occasion
a poet is blinded
when a full stop explodes

in an emergency
full stops can be made
by slicing the ears from commas
these will not have the same longevity
as ones naturally conceived

there was a king
who kept full stops under his foreskin
he felt they were sentinels
able to repel impotent likelihoods
as an old man
he had them set into a ring for his heir

centuries ago full stops traded their voices for stillness
full stops have happily held themselves hostage ever since

for those with the skills and the inclination
larger full stops can be filleted on a table
then added as seasoning to a cooked-up theory

full stops are qualified to operate
the elevator in the spinal cord
full stops monitor all movements
between moment and sensation

full stops will migrate immense distance to pursue conclusion

a full stop can kill an ego without moving

a handful of full stops cannot be lifted

full stops clog the pores in the face of an unwilling god
most full stops believe their god to be an eclipse
most full stops do not have a mother

full stops with imperfections
are sent to work for question marks

flies are attracted to full stops
when they are in flower

lies are the only natural predator of the full stop

one full stop equals the circumference of one thought

a full stop alone can hear gravity’s song
its black yolk heavy with philosophical protein

placed in the tear ducts at the point of death
one pair of full stops will absorb the entire memory

he could never bring himself to use full stops that were still alive
he would suck them back off the page through a glass straw

full stops are very superstitious about their placement

a full stop
will gladly dissolve
its own parliament
in its own mind

(a blank page
actually a cemetery
white with
white with
white with
bleached bodies
the bleached bodies
of crumbling full stops)

Nathan Shepherdson

Danger: Lantana 

sampling Jeffrey Harrison’s ‘Danger: Tulip’,
from Ploughshares, Winter 2006–07

Was I hoping to find my way to the creek, loud
with unseasonal rain, and to see, perhaps,
a few winter wattles, and catch a magpie or two
warbling in a melaleuca, when I took a track
I’d never taken before, through light scrub first
and then a scrappy paddock, across a wet gully,
then into another paddock? Beyond a paling fence
appeared then, gradually, first the corrugated roof
and then the bare weatherboard walls of what I
suddenly recognised as The Southern Cross Home .

One stair was gone, and the long veranda where
once two dozen of us had washed side by side
in our own bucket and bowl every morning now
had a few treacherous board ends and a couple
of shin-threatening gaps, and much of the paint
was peeling and lifting. One end was defended
by a turret of lantana, swaying its cachous of red
and yellow and white, the end near the room
I’d shared with three others, to a total of thirteen.
I noticed that not a window was broken, though

all now had newspapers pasted over them, inside.
I had merely chanced here, but how quickly now
I felt compelled to find my old room, breathe it.
Lantana had thicketed the corner of the veranda
as surely as in the fairy tale, but I considered
the art of slighting, and crouched low enough
to enter the musty darkness beneath the place,
brushing cobwebs from my shoulders as I sought
a gap in the floorboards. One I found admitted
my hands and no more, yielded to my efforts,

the breaking of splintery timber bursting dust
into my eyes a moment. I wriggled up into the hall,
saw the shapes where pictures had been removed,
stepped gingerly towards my dorm, pulled the knob
towards me till the door yielded suddenly and
dustily, then stepped towards the corner where
my bunk had been, lower at first till Henry left,
then the upper during Albert, Peder, and Vince.
Without intention, I felt on the door frame where
I’d pocket-knifed my height each year. Inhaled

but smelled nothing of then, only the sweeting
decay of this moment. But lantana too, one cane
of it through the wall, actually two. And two paces
to peel 17 March 1986 off the window in three
deft swathes, and to see the lantana becoming
a part of the building. And, concentrating, to see
Saxon Creek was silent now, a gully where once
a stream had sung to us all night. And the singing
flowed down my cheeks for Albert, Peder, Vince
and Henry and all the others in that faraway dorm.

And did I break the window and climb out; did I
scrabble through the lantana; did I stride down
the slope to the creek whose singing waters were
now no more than a gully-bog? Did I stumble back
to the picnic-ground with its signs of invitation
and warning and drink from its bubbler? And did I
unlock my late-model car, wryly recalling a camera
still in the glove-box; and did I drive away then,
thumbing memory’s album, trying to flick
its fading polaroids out of the window?
Later, bathe my scratches against infection?

The Window

… it seems to the man that an immense black window opens wide before him and that his thin little gray human soul is going to fly out through this window and his lifeless body will stay lying on the bed … At that moment, the immense and utterly black window will swing shut with a bang.

Daniil Kharms

Empty mornings are beautiful,
alone at first light, the desk by my tall glass windows.
Across a rooftop in a dark apartment
someone bends over another desk, alone.
On a balcony streets away
the shape of a man smoking, lifting a cigarette,
his shoulders curving to the beginning of age,
the loss of bone.
Three boys are sleeping in the room below.
All sixteen, sleeping in the morning.
one has a Chinese mother, one has an English mother,
one is truly mine.

In the night when the glass is black
and the trains sing quietly as they come into the station
it is possible to listen for illness
returning like a husband,
back on the train from some war, some bar or hotel room,
the key turning, the stairway taking weight;
it is possible to worry about the other girls,
companions of various husbands,
foreign perhaps, and young, and suffering while you sleep.

I stand at the window of this great house in the South of France …
So Baldwin begins a novel about an execution.
In Paris, in the morning, a man will be guillotined.
Outside the window lies his lover’s journey,
the wait behind the prison walls, the knife.
Death, judicious and unbearable.
Dying or not dying or not dying now but later;
my own death is beneath my skin.
If only I could hear the children breathing in their sleep.
The air moves differently outside,
the train leads to a city, not a prison.

My desk is the long white desk of a novelist:
poets may use such desks but I think of it as the desk of a novelist.
The man smoking on the balcony by the highway,
the man who writes without light in his apartment,
are workers in the service of a novelist,
they will speak to each other one day
at the peeling wall of the Japanese restaurant
that point where the style and the money ran out
and I will not be watching their exchange. 

I have been in the hospital by the river,
I have been still, so quiet and still
like a dying person in a book or film
while the truly dying woman in the next bed gripped a triangle above her,
raising herself to make a little space in her ruined chest,
using her arms for every breath,
waiting for the failure of her arms.
I have myself been held up by a wall of arms,
the arms of those who love and care for me.
But I never was a window,
was never clear and steady in that wall.
Ah love, let us be true to one another
Heart by heart on sand or shells with white sea-birds
On the endless grains of pale crushed faith once mighty and inhabited
We can speak the smallest words: true and also love
And not be saved by love
or even blessed by clarity.

I could walk from my bed to the topmost stair
if only I were strong enough
I could crouch in my nightclothes, the gift of my mother,
a gift of desperate love,
as if death would turn aside from white pyjamas.
I could look down on the grown children still children in their sleep,
the Chinese boy, the English one,
the one who is most truly mine.
I could say love and goodness
as if all harm would turn aside. 

My brother’s wife, the mother of my smallest niece,
has forgotten her way to the mosque
but not the story of what happens when you die.
You are buried in a garden in Shiraz,
city of roses and high unbroken walls.
Your head is turned to one side, listening for the sound of angels,
you are beyond all vision now.
The angels come with their simple questions.
She tilts her head as she tells me this, miming her own burial
amongst all the parents and the children lost to her family in Shiraz.
This is a story of what happens when you die.
She plans to be cremated in Australia. 

Rain slants on yellow leaves outside the window.
All through this illness I am upright on pillows,
my eyes fixed on the rain behind the glass, or my reflection.
My vision slips and steadies, slips again.
Quiet, watching the blood-brown of blindness,
Some effect of the effects of chemotherapy.
Then the glass returns, the leaves and rain.
This glass which says you are no longer blind,
and look, I make this copy of you,
without the fearful circulation of your breath and blood.
You are awake, grown children sleep below.

This is the thing that all our windows do.

Brenda Walker

Danil Kharms, ‘So it is in Life’, 1937, trans. Matvei Yankelvich, with Simona Schneider and Eugene Ostaeshevsky, The New Yorker, 6 August 2007; James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, 1956; and Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, 1867.