The Best Australian Poems 2011 by John Tranter Page B

her. We focus on this one moment.
    Â 
    What are the pearls on your necklace, the figures on your torq?
    At the heart of travel is blood and family ties.
    Â 
    How much are you willing to pay for what you want?
    In leaving, what we leave behind we hope is a gift, not a sorrow.
    Â 
    (iv) New York
    â€˜Get out of my terminal!’ shouts the cop in JFK.
    It’s all street theatre here, and underneath, on the E line.
    Â 
    â€˜What’s the point of travel?’ we ask. Three lines to three places,
    only to do it all over again.
    Â 
    The red-tail hawk, with its speckled breast, makes one crashing dive
    to carry off the sparrow on the railing.
    Â 
    How pointless can it be, when our lives describe a triangle,
    while we find ourselves at home at the centre of ourselves?

Rapptown
S.K. Kelen
    A jingle woke and gee-up knew.
    Who prime-numbered the village –
    routed the countryside? a wolf sack
    filled with of courses, perhapses, and maybe.
    Power feeds the organ’s gaskets, postures,
    lizard, plasma, shouting blue – schism –
    people believe and behave. Where country
    and town woe begone, the cars breathe fire.
    There was relax and friend-hut, warmth
    to the chilled the shelterer provided;
    a gentle hand opened a door to the future
    and the village? A nymph went wild – a guest’s
    wheels – then the bull exploded, the creek
    flooded, the shower screen was brilliantine.

Temporality
Cate Kennedy
    I’ll ask you to assemble here
    next to the step where so many feet have stood shifting,
    waiting for a welcome,
    that they have worn a cupped impression in the brick.
    Â 
    There are no headphones or podcast,
    no virtual tour
    nothing is animatronic
    there are not even signs;
    in this museum objects must be noticed
    in order to be named.
    Â 
    Let me invite you
    to put your sceptical fingers here, into a wall
    cracked open like a seam;
    in that arid subsiding spot,
    with its bite of jagged mortar exposed,
    feel the evidence, deliberate as a glacier,
    of movement
    of the power of slow ruin.
    Â 
    And in the shed on this salvaged beam
    taken from the old factory, you can read
    the faded names of workers from half a century ago
    still scrawled, provisionally, in pencil:
    Joe Wally Gavin Terry
    Â 
    This four-inch nail banged in beside them to hold invoices
    that they always meant to replace with a decent hook or clip;
    see how it’s still holding fast
    long after they have gone,
    see how they were wrong
    about what was temporary.
    Â 
    These are the exhibits worth naming,
    the triumph of the nondescript
    the steady rise and rise
    of the inevitable.
    Â 
    Seeing them here, barely visible, demanding nothing,
    might remind you of your own belongings –
    the last things you expected to have bundled under your arm;
    the shirts washed colourless, and the unfinished books
    that you know would have done you good,
    one hand clutching the dented pie dish, scored
    like an endless unsolved equation
    the hat with its forgotten tidemarks of sweat
    Â 
    everything it’s too late to grieve for
    that you thought you had discarded
    everything you used, unthinkingly,
    until it was burnished
    into invisibility
    these remnants, adrift from their stories,
    will end up here too.
    Â 
    Whatever lies we tell ourselves,
    these are the things that will outlive us:
    that brick
    will see us out;
    that forgotten nail
    driven in with four heedless, glinting hammer blows
    back in 1957
    will remain immoveable in that piece of hardwood
    when you and I are dust.
    Â 
    And the ghosts who’ve stopped in this doorway
    and rested one hand tiredly against the wall
    to take off their boots before coming inside –
    just here, their fingers grazing this worn unsanctified spot –
    their voices are as distant
    as impossible
    as sirens.
    Â 
    Well, this is where I leave you
    to make your way through the rooms,
    threading back and back into the hushed corners,
    your lips moving with recognition,
    until