A few new poems by John Stokes

 Ariadne whispering

She hesitates at the gate...

The vines scrape down 
She speaks, softer
than time sliding its locks
than the leaves shade-searching.

A hiss of new entry
dark stories flooding
from her belly, dark hair
preceding the yet unseen.

Don’t, she whispers
- don’t cut me in half
- that Chinese, sleepy, girl
sliding off with a pale youth.

They’ve gone off together
as with any whispering,
looking for the noble wish
the hoarded lie twining.

Sleep, sharp as any iron
tendrils the gateway
All things will fade
from the face of the naked.

The great illusion remains:
that her breath caught, her warmth
come into, would have been better
than the unseen, opening.

 

Elegy from a seaside
graveyard


… and this stone-picture’s Wayne, the Suicide 
doing it his way: longest finger
cocked up from the earth
into the sealight fading.

Here the surfer, boy of the sea
still suckled by his mother feeling
his salt mouth, his sighing
over the tablet gravestone of the waves.

Here the incongruous, Calvinist whalers
moaning with their predestinations:
born in sin, living to lament
relieving themselves in death

and here the mother lover, with her child
still moving, on top and hung
in the harness, the smash cut
gently into the mind at twilight

and Brad, who knew Sherryl
in the fullest Biblical sense
and Nathanial, who knew the kill
and the smell and ways of the mulloway.

These deaths: are so Australian
and yet, the same. They are sung
in the tongue of the water, the hiss
of the sandgrains rubbing

one with another, and another
and another, under bellbirds
sounding their deathknells
into the sealight fading.

So leave the dead ones to it
- they are, after all, forever
love them, leave them, go
pausing once, at some corner

(you will know when)
so the car-hoon
when he misses you by a nail
              gives you the finger!

Resurrect your breath.

Drive on.


Beginning again


not suddenly
but with a chill,weak
hurt expanding
            taking in
the fall of the shoulder
the shadow in the fork
the shudder of rain
on old silences.

Nothing was hoped:
maybes,familiars,
enclosures,empty
words imagined
shared, a wire
caught unbroken
back to a fear

of letting go:
too many years
invested.   So goad
the children on
to their own next
Autumns…they remain
our visible evidence

Existence, the moment, is cutting
now, unwanting,
unnoticed, slowly
along the valley
change-line…
a chill, weak
light expanding… 

 
3 Days on the D’Entrecasteaux Channel

Air-rain on the channel:
a body shivers itself into the lee of nothing:-
Swanson, long-dead uncle, making his last tack
a bare ledge-breadth above the Antarctic
into an opening blown clear through
into the imaginings of the damned,
the grey-beards running deep in to cast their auguries,
a true south-westerly breathing in his ear.

~

Sun-rain on the channel:
Today, rainbows, and random blessings on water
and the breath of ghosts on a rim:- the Swanson wife
the second one, the suicide, remembering
a silent music of imagined shining:
chance and wavespill on the edge of another country,
the safely lost, an order sung onto the waters.

~

Ground-rain on the channel:
and around the swelling island,
new ground; the subdivisions receiving their dues,
water, welling and driving the quince tree
as knuckles soften and push through soaked rock,
fattens the ground. And around, the bending island,
the dead uncle, the dead wife, the childless ones,
whisper lies of their next voyage.
There is rain on the channel…



 
The Carp-fishers

Let there be two pines darkened
against a silver lake
and sun-gulled light, let
the drum-wave of the traffic begin
the sallow flush from head-high roofs
slanting down to the carp-fishers…

Let there be theology for the teeth
& practical fire
& soft tongues, brown
lapped water wished
along stone walls
built hand, by hand, by hand.



 The Opening
          Tracing Charles Conder

PART 1: The Scriber wakes above the river                                                                      
           
 
The scriber wakes and shines above water; the shadows harden into grit
This little groove is washed by song; under Big Mens’ smooth feet

And two men are fighting in the middle of the road
      There is much focking in the tongues of the people
        Dark ones are flopping in the dark 
Blue-wired girls are slopping in the breezeway

A man in a dreamcoat’s standing in the rain
      and in Africa, a lake is turning over…



Something from Rosie


The night before you died
I heard you, Rosie, creeping
down a dark hallway.

I am leaving, now,
you said. I’ll not be late.
I have given everything.

Look after my sister,
walk the last with my friends,
write truly.

Speak softly to the silence.
The word you are looking for is  love.
Keep the word.