POEM: "Spleen III"

Spleen III

The faces of Chinese women in anguish

           forced detentions

                 the razing of homes

the vanity of old men with dyed hair

the tether of foolishness

           already in opposition

                 at times the only way out 

sits quietly upon the stair

shoo away the temple rats
          (maybe pray away the time)
                 Guanyin please help us
fold these dumplings with extra care

some faces from the years I've lived there:

[CENSORED]

© 2013 Rob Schackne

A Chris Wallace-Crabbe Poem

Rendition


Not, please, this creeping elaborate pain
and not slow parody of how lives end,
nor policemen in mufti playing a dirty god,
not the stinking underside of Elsewhere,
regimes of colonels or generals or psychopaths,
not fascination with seeing just how far a body can be made to go
nor the treatment of survival as precisely equal to dying.

Please, not a battering on the door at three in the morning;
not, I'm afraid, you're going to have to come with me.
Not the large plain dull old car
waiting outside your door with motor grumbling
for the quick take-off,
nor the bareness of a shabby room with overbright lighting.
Not Them, moving in.

Certainly not having to take off your clothes;
water, the truncheon, the cold, the blaring, the slaps
and long standing still in one damned place,
not the prodded humiliation of your nudity,
clothed ones treating you as a slab of meat,
not the drawn-out thickness of questioning
and not the detumescence of hope.

Not the naked genitals like frightened mice,
not something hard inserted in the vagina,
not pints of liquid trickled down your throat,
not a bully's foul breath up against your face
as concentration goes,
not the pummelled phonebook against your guts
leaving no distinct bruises.

Not the electrodes.
Fuck, no, not the electrodes
and not your buttocks beaten, then beaten again,
not something pushed right up under your fingernails
nor a bloody gobbet hacked off your left ear –
which you are then going to be forced to eat.
Not weeks without food.

Bodies have been designed frail, by and large, by and small,
ready to be tormented and taken apart.
The shit may run down your cold legs.
You may die.
You will suffer and die.
You will survive, language holding some trace of you for years,
And the mourners, too.


(2013)

POEM: "Climbing Rock: A Meditation"

Climbing Rock: A Meditation

                                      .for the freaky mountain kids

Look along any line keep the light

any grip of angle know the hope

we are distracted

divine winds hum stand off don’t hug

first rule of salvation never hang from a rope

the subtle atomicities of evil

hold my cold flexed hand

maintain the grip on a winter day

where fear is not 

the summit is finally reached
days & nights they pass away 

the happy ending

evidence prominent 
witnesses numerous

the falcon circling us 

one will never say

I cannot do that 

old friend miraculous.

© 2013 Rob Schackne

POEM: "The Turn"

The Turn


You've been brave that way
no stopping in the tunnel
so Li'l Buck just danced today
won't you dance he was asking

but there's no need to answer that
sometimes bravery's just a sudden thing
now consider if you’re dancing high
in gunfire shelling or screams
when did you turn into wolf
smell of gun oil in your bed
the big swans dying from love?


© 2013 Rob Schackne

A Carolyn Kizer Poem

On a Line from Valéry (The Gulf War)

                            Tout le ciel vert se meurt
                            Le dernier arbre brûle.


The whole green sky is dying. The last tree flares 
With a great burst of supernatural rose 
Under a canopy of poisonous airs. 

Could we imagine our return to prayers 
To end in time before time's final throes, 
The green sky dying as the last tree flares? 

But we were young in judgement, old in years 
Who could make peace; but it was war we chose, 
To spread its canopy of poisoning airs. 

Not all our children's pleas and women's fears 
Could steer us from this hell. And now God knows 
His whole green sky is dying as it flares. 

Our crops of wheat have turned to fields of tares. 
This dreadful century staggers to its close 
And the sky dies for us, its poisoned heirs. 

All rain was dust. Its granules were our tears. 
Throats burst as universal winter rose 
To kill the whole green sky, the last tree bare 
Beneath its canopy of poisoned air.


(1996)

A Barry Dickins Poem

The Million Australias


You gaze into a wintry silver pond and what do you see there?
Well, your nose to begin with. Possibly an outline of frosty air
And breath, let’s not forget your breath. And your old friends the trees
The outline of something you were thinking aloud: An interrupting breeze
A word or two that say winter in English
Or tell you how cold and sharp it is today in Portuguese
A library pond and pages of wintry words
Now an incredibly important meeting between birds
Who can remember Captain Cook and Mrs. Cook two hundred years ago
When he first saw student dolphins and librarians from Atlantis
Dreamt long ago of Aboriginals inventing short stories in ashes
Years go by taxi and now there are a million Australias all reading
Translations from wintry silver ponds and talking about dreaming
Walking The Long Narrow Road to The North by Basho the Chinese mystic
He is reading his early morning poem to rain that’s almost crystal
Pioneers in the raindrops turning over favourite marked passages of sun
Flemington is tracing the murmured lettering of The Songs of Solomon
Teachers are listening very carefully to their teachers the children
The topics are endless, like glee, mystery, secret access to incredible buildings
Spanish singing overheard from unknown windowpanes
Cranes and sparrows - are they Australians? Oh let us arrange our dreams
Once more in the old design of openness and the one language of dreams
Is it still a hundred years ago or more? This is the Blessed Door
Time to get up and go to work: And what’s the work but writing for God
Up those ancient seawave steps again to write for the poor and give more
Lines of dreaming to the captive schoolchildren in their desks of hope
My Grandmother is getting up to go to work in 1900 did you know her?
A factory job where she worked her brains out to put bread upon the waves
Of sea tables where dolphins memorized their morning prayer and saved
A Fragment of her laughter to share with a thousand other pioneers
The old lady, Australia, shakes the toy world of learning now
Holds it upside down and smiles as meaning tumbles down into snow
Every single person is sitting up nice and straight in classrooms of brightness
Each old story tumbles down in the printed snowflake of brightness
What you said to me a hundred years ago: What I said back just then
What herons said to pigeons and teachers dreamt of in rooms like beacons
All possible and all beautiful because we bothered to record stories.


(2001)

POEM: "Ordinary Bizarro"

Ordinary Bizarro


At dinner tonight I overheard
Someone say, this crummy planet
I turn around – of course the table's Chinese
They're discussing an unrelated matter
Money or some other delicate relationship
Us do opposite all Earthly things
Now I hope I’m not in for this again
Plain speech drifting into strangeness
Confucian lessons in fluent acrimony
How me protector no one here protect?
When you see how it functions
When it goes around in your head
When it comes out different.


© 2013 Rob Schackne

A Les Murray Poem (2)

The International Terminal

Some comb oil, some blow air,
some shave trenchlines in their hair
but the common joint thump, the heart's spondee
kicks off in its rose-lit inner sea
like an echo, at first, of the one above
it on the dodgy ladder of love —
and my mate who's driving says I never
found one yet worth staying with forever.
In this our poems do not align.
Surely most are if you are, answers mine,
and I am living proof of it,
I gloom, missing you from the cornering outset —
and hearts beat mostly as if they weren't there,
rocking horse to rocking chair,
most audible dubbed on the tracks of movies
or as we approach where our special groove is
or our special fear. The autumn-vast
parking-lot-bitumen overcast
now switches on pumpkin-flower lights
all over dark green garden sites
and a wall of car-bodies, stacked by blokes,
obscures suburban signs and smokes.
Like coughs, cries, all such unlearned effects
the heartbeat has no dialects
but what this or anything may mean
depends on what poem we're living in.
Now a jet engine, huge child of a gun,
shudders with haze and begins to run.
Over Mount Fuji and the North Pole
I'm bound for Europe in a reading role
and a poem long ago that was coming for me
had Fuji-san as its axle-tree.
Cities shower and rattle over the gates
as I enter that limbo between states
but I think of the heart swarmed around by poems
like an egg besieged by chromosomes
and how out of that our world is bred
through the back of a mirror, with clouds in its head
— and airborne, with a bang, this five-hundred-seat
theatre folds up its ponderous feet.

(2002)

An Alexandra Teague Poem

Adjectives of Order

That summer, she had a student who was obsessed
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when

Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order
could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook
with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering

streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard,
she wrote: The mother took warm homemade bread
from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade

is essential to bread. He copied this down, but
he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before
older, if he worked security at a twenty-story modern

downtown bank or downtown twenty-story modern.
When he first arrived, he did not know enough English
to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part

of Lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic
leather Bible. Evaluation before size. Age before color.
Nationality before religion. Time before length. Adding

and, one could determine if two adjectives were equal.
After Saigon fell, he had survived nine long years
of torture. Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.


(2007)

An Adam Fell Poem (2)

Coffin Tree

Somewhere in the national forest,
there is a coffin tree for each of us,
chosen at birth, containing us
completely, even in its youngest seedling.
If we keep no one left to love, to love us,
to cut it down, to afford it
carved to order, we will wander,
the flower bridge, the light-rail route,
the geopark lot, unclean ghosts
the clouded blue of our deepening cataracts.
What’s left of us, children moved to city,
smudged air of our once bodies, is holding,
exhausted, the village brinkline of trees
from the road, disappearing as the mist
that beads us shape burns off at dawn.
There is a difference between fire shaped
like a horse and a horse made of fire.

(2010)

POEM: "Hope Is The Mutt"

Hope Is The Mutt


The little things that Emily said –
hope is like the leaves on that thing
feathers are on the bird a word a bone
I'll just say if you were truly of the outside
then you might've explained to me
the vagaries of human commerce
(your hope really is as shabby as a mutt)
goodbye & thanks for the ton of food
I'll think of you occasionally
but if I don’t please know
that it's probably all OK.

© 2013 Rob Schackne 

A Dennis O'Driscoll Poem

Weather Permitting

I

The August day you wake to takes you by surprise.
Its bitterness. Black sullen clouds. Brackish downpour.
A drift-net of wetness enmeshes the rented cottage,
towels and children’s swimwear sodden on the line.

Dry-gulleted drains gulp down neat rain.
Drops bounce from a leaking gutter with hard,
uncompromising slaps: and, like resignation
in the face of death, you contemplate winter

with something close to tenderness, the sprint
from fuel shed to back door, the leisurely
ascent of peat smoke, even the suburban haze
of boiler flues when thermostats are set.

You warm to those thoughts as you sit there,
brainstorming ways to keep the family amused,
plans abandoned for barefoot games on dry sand.
Handcraft shops? Slot-machine arcades? Hotel grills?

In truth - manipulating toast crumbs backwards,
forwards at the unsteady table’s edge - you’d prefer
to return to your bed as if with some mild
ailment, pampered by duvet, whiskey, cloves.


II

Let it rain.
Let the clouds discharge their contents like reserve tanks.
Let the worms burrow their way to the topsoil
from whatever dank Sargasso they were spawned in.
Let dampness rot the coffin-boards of the summer house.
Let the shrubs lose their foothold in the wind,
the nettles lose their edge, the drenched rat
with slicked-back hair scuttle to its sewage pipe.
Let the tropical expanses of the rhubarb leaves
serve as an artificial pond, a reservoir.
Let the downpour’s impact on the toolshed be akin
to the dull applause on an archive recording of a love duet.
Let the bricklayers at the building site wrap
pathetic sheets of polythene around doomed foundations.
Let the limb ripped from the tree’s socket
hover fleetingly in the air, an olive branch.
Let a rainbow’s fantail unfurl like a bird of paradise.
Let a covenant be sealed, its wording watertight.
Let the floods recede.
Let there be light.


III  

                        (after Giacomo Leopardi)

The storm runs out of wind; nature, which
abhors a silence, fills the vacancy with birdsong.
Deserting the airless, low-ceilinged coop,
the hen repeats herself ad infinitum. Replenished
like the rain-barrels, hearts grow sanguine.

Hammering resumes. Humming. Gossip. Croons.
Sun strides down lanes that grass has repossessed,
takes a shine to the brasses at the hotel where,
by the window she thrust open, the chambermaid
is marvelling at the cleansed freshness, calm.

Balm of mind and body. Will we ever feel
more reconciled to life than now, ever
know a moment more conducive to new hopes,
eager beginnings, auspicious starts?
How easily pleased we are. Rescind

the threat of torment for the briefest
second and we blot out dark nights of the soul
when lightning flashes fanned by wind
ignited fire and brimstone visions.
Sorrow is perennial; happiness, a rare

bloom, perfumes the air - so that we breathe
with the ease of a camphor-scented chest
from which congestion has just lifted.
Lack of woe equates with rapture then,
though not till death will pain take full leave

of our senses, grant us permanent relief.


(1999)

POEM: "Your Photograph"

Your Photograph


ah that's

easy what

you’ve got there

is a camel 

a picture of

a castration

awful cries

now cut off

the male joins

forever not

a sex but a

dumb community

of burden

now cut off

or else it’s

(one version)

a simple melée 

of camels
like Les says
brutal policy
like inferior art
knows whose
fault it all is

slow diversion

local motorcade

now cut off

the ambassador’s

the tactics

the policies

all a bit too

bloody slow

© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Meena Alexander Poem

Night Theater

Snails circle

A shed where a child was born.

She bled into straw –
Who can write this?

Under Arcturus, 

Rubble of light:

We have no words 

For what is happening –

Still language endures

Celan says

As he stood in a torn

Green coat

Shivering a little,

In a night theater, in Bremen.

(2012)

POEM: "Get On The Plane"

Get On The Plane
                                  
                                       for Greg Gamage


To overegg the ____
Only I can't think of the what
The lily, the moment, the cooking
The face that isn't looking

Mooncake, new case or the dog
Is it their door on Halloween?
Christmas or the New Year coming
Some other place they haven't been

My mate Greg was right I guess
About the zombies at the airport
Travel is wasted on useless currents 
Overegg it all and get away with it
James Bond in a cool white suit
I think I’ll leave the martinis alone
So many broken eggs I’m unmoved
Pity about the shitty legroom though.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Brian Henry Poem

Corona

The opening (read: aperture)
is open by design (read: default),
so susceptible to departure

with the brain floating, bag of salt,
loud, malleable light, the sky profuse
in its movement from rim to vault,

an orb (read: void) open to obtuse
approach from any outer corridor
(read: vector), as if angle could produce

what sight announces as visitor,
a gravity-infected flash, or fleck,
that, focused, becomes meteor,

the surface less limit than wreck,
the eye a crash site, open to air,
onto a sky that will not reflect.


(2012)

POEM: "Overcast"

Overcast


Of the moments
that restored my
faith in humanity
I think I'll remember
one or two of them
& this second one just
left me wondering whether
she was really better off
(she didn't listen to me
now she lives in Germany)
first one's hidden
sorry it's the terms
of my dumb faith
just starting to rain
take it with a grain of salt.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Aside"

Aside


You read of a guy who wrote
a novel of 80 thousand pages
who couldn’t work out the ending
even so he managed to say it
& he even mentioned this too
the deficiencies you’re feeling
in the rose garden of doubt
arc and mise-en-scène
a dog’s old toy in the yard.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Ben Doller Poem

Parochial Poetry

Whiter I make it when walking right in
unswerved, sweating fluorescent bleach,
preaching a moon page that says its welts:
learn this by heart is empty but do it
to do it. I make it somehow whiter, zombied
and I opified allover the absolutely
whitest room. I say keep your lines in line
and look at me now just lining them,
some flogged orthodoxen, ploughed
down sillion shiny sacerdotal lines
I'm supposed to like and looky I do.
I like what I like. I just like what I like.
I like to say look: dissident anachronistics,
shambolic stuff in master rows but look
at me. I even early balded to enhance
the interrogation. I meander in and form more
order. I like to point with my pointer, to
indicate. The most afraid I like to get is
a little bit. I app my accounts and survey
the advantage. I tower under.
I oxiclean the ivory. I shower and shower.
I dig on fonts. I wake up singing I say
never start with that but one morning
I wake up singing the Fat Boys. I wikipede
The Fat Boys. One of them is no longer.
The other is no longer fat. I assess the Human
beatbox via a Schwittersian optic.
I exercise my massive rights. I have the right
to remain. I remain. I interview just
like a glacier. I hand dance. I like just
what I like. My skin is white not. It fits
just tight. It burns on will. My horizon
is fungible. My will is like whatever.
My SPF is infinity. People seem to like
me. I was just born just this way.

(2012)

POEM: "Death"

Death 

Never again to say
I missed you so much 
Or, sleep on your own damn side.

© 2012 Rob Schackne

An Adam Fell Poem (1)

Corporation

                        I don't know how to say 

how I feel politely, or poetically, or without 

the jugular and collapse of the immediate 

heart, so tonight, I won't say anything at 

all. Just stare out the window at our 

stunned little writhe. Hold back the 

strongest urge to knock out a few of the 

capitol's most critical walls, replace its 

fiber optic cables with lightning bugs, 

replace the investment bankers all with 

bunker busters. I lock eyes with the 

capitol's bright and empty rooms and admit 

that, sometimes, deep in my affluent, 

American cells, I miss my body carved to 

projectile. I miss trebuchet shoulders and 

knuckles flaked to arrowheads, miss my 

hands massive and molded from molten to 

the bolts of ballistas. I miss blackjack and 

cudgel and quarterstaff and flintlock. I miss 

pummel and pike and I am not proud of 

this. I know it's not a healthy feeling. I try 

to un-arm, to un-cock. I try to practice my 

breathing. I try The Master Cleanse, The 

Stationary Bike, The Bikram Sweat, The 

Contortion Stretch, The Vegan Meatloaf, 

The Nightly, Scorching Bath, The Leafy 

Greens and Venom Television, The Self-

Mutilation of a Winter's Run, but we can 

only cleanse our bodies so much before we 

realize it's not our bodies that need 

detoxing.

(2012)

A Samuel Greenberg Poem

Conduct

By a peninsula the painter sat and

Sketched the uneven valley groves.
The apostle gave alms to the
Meek. The volcano burst
In fusive sulphur and hurled
Rocks and ore into the air—
Heaven’s sudden change at
The drawing tempestuous,
Darkening shade of dense clouded hues.
The wanderer soon chose
His spot of rest; they bore the
Chosen hero upon their shoulders,
Whom they strangely admired, as
The beach-tide summer of people desired.

(1915)

POEM: "Rehearsal"

Rehearsal


Alright I’ve said it the ass
depends upon the legs like
a clock on a minute’s notice
the banjax awaits the band
there’s nothing new under
the sun except the sun while
we’re roaring like monsters
dammit you didn’t know it
now I say it the form attends
an invisible quiet thing.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Louise Glück Poem

The Night Migrations 

This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds' night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won't see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won't need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.


(2006)

POEM: "The Afternoon"

The Afternoon


Why you were an hour late
planned to shuck your husband
to meet me later in the room
I felt strangely neutral like I was
your husband wanting to know
why it takes 2 hours to buy rice
after when you were a bag of rice
we were just a pair of stomachs
& we looked out of the window
there was a man painting
his balcony red in the rain
the sky was mostly grey &
not much chance of letting up.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Shanna Compton Poem

Panoramic View


Last week Mars suddenly got a lot closer.
It used to be the place we'd throw out
as impossible, utterly unreachable, so red
and foreign and sere. Not anymore.
And I'm trying to figure out why watching
the panorama makes something in the hot core
of me crumple like a swig-emptied can,
intoxicating though it may be, vibrant
with out-of-this-world color like the whole thing's
a sand painting, a dimensional mandala
some galactic monk took her sweet time pouring
freehand, blowing on it between sips of her tea,
ruffling up the most dramatic of its rumpled crests.
It's bluer than I thought, attained. Like most things
I wish we could take back.


(2012)

POEM: "Archy In The House"

Archy In The House

this long hard climb 

youre on how much 

further do you have to go 

good lord i hope that 

youre not entirely on 

your own the poems i

mean they help like 

flowers do so never 

dismiss that comfort   

in the speak tonight i

saw a chinese guy regale 

his birthday gal with a

bouquet of toy bunnies

but nothing she could

do till they got home

© 2012 Rob Schackne

A David Hernandez Poem

At the Post Office


The line is long, processional, glacial,
and the attendant a giant stone, cobalt blue
with flecks of white, I’m not so much
looking at a rock but a slab of night.
The stone asks if anything inside the package
is perishable. When I say no the stone
laughs, muted thunderclap, meaning
everything decays, not just fruit
or cut flowers, but paper, ink, the CD
I burned with music, and my friend
waiting to hear the songs, some little joy
after chemo eroded the tumor. I know flesh
is temporary, and memory a tilting barn
the elements dismantle nail by nail.
I know the stone knows a millennia of rain
and wind will even grind away
his ragged face, and all of this slow erasing
is just a prelude to when the swelling
universe burns out, goes dark, holds
nothing but black holes, the bones of stars
and planets, a vast silence. The stone
is stone-faced. The stone asks how soon
I want the package delivered. As fast
as possible, I say, then start counting the days.


(2011)

An Emily Dickinson Poem

(472)


Except the heaven had come so near,
So seemed to choose my door,
The distance would not haunt me so;
I had not hoped before.

But just to hear the grace depart
I never thought to see,
Afflicts me with a double loss;
’Tis lost, and lost to me.

(ca. 1864)