from Issue #3: Poetry by Mark O’Connor

Photo (CC) Maxwell Hamilton @ Flickr

*

Diana Spencer (1961-1997)

Trapped and snapped,
cut from twisted tin,
a blowfly on the windscreen
preening its compound lenses.

Nothing to be done. They sewed her back,
packed the cut flesh in ice and flowers.

Not one for white gloves,
kneeling to the young and the dying
while those lanky knees pushed out,
she proved kings were film stars,
then deposed the prince.

TV made it like a death in the family;
anchors maudlinly adding “Diana up-dates”
to pre-recorded game-shows.

The decent, balding would-be-King arrived,
his face the colour of scraped beef,
and claimed his wife from the dead boyfriend.
Dying, she gave back his crown.

It was a young girl’s dream of ceremony
to be so taken up, believing
husbands mean “I love” when they say “I do”.
As he led her into the public’s den
she had leaned so shyly on him,
seeking that ease and devotion
reserved for another.

Even London held off its weather.
A minute’bell tolled each stage of her ride
with tall men like centaurs riding beside her,
spattered with seasonal flowers
canonised as a fallible saint, a flame
strongest when half blown out.

The crowd gave her the gift of its silence,
the sound of lilies striking on tarmac
like one hand clapping on earth;
and snuffled its dreams of her into a million hankies.

At the palace, a weeping wall
of flowers and plastic. Commentators
rich from tickling the public’s itch,
pondered such public decencies; and a priest asked
why folk should worship with lilies a mateless mother,
child-like and adulterous, whose knack was to set
her bruised heart helpless on display.

Round her corpse they wrapped natural ermine
cotton and timber; as if sending her back
to some green Avalon, lake-island, out
of a life lived in the smell of fresh paint.

*

ABOUT THE POET

Mark O’Connor was born in Melbourne in 1945 and graduated from Melbourne University in 1965. He has been the Australian National University’s HC Coombs Fellow and a visiting scholar in its Department of Archaeology and Natural History. His poetry shows special interests in Italy (where he spent some years), in the Barrier Reef, and in other Australian environments. He has published 15 books of verse and is the editor of OUP’s much re-printed Two Centuries of Australian Poetry. He was Australia’s ‘Olympic poet’ for the Sydney 2000 Games, with a fellowship from the Australia Council to ‘report in verse on the Games’. Visit him at www.australianpoet.com

Photo: Canberra Launch @ Manning Clark House

Photograph by Clare Anderson

At the Canberra launch of Contrappasso #2. Left to right: editor Matthew Asprey, poets Mark O’Connor, Erin Martine Sessions, Chris Oakey, and Luke Whitington, and poetry editor Theodore Ell.

For our Sydney readers, don’t forget: we launch issue #2 at Sappho Books in Glebe on Wednesday 12 December (6pm start).

from issue #2: Poetry by Mark O’Connor (III)

Photo (CC) Tango7174 @ Wikimedia Commons

Virgil at Mantua, 1977

Well done maestro!  High on the monument
you stand.  Right arm outstretched instructs
the town, palm turned in the classic pose
of a Monty Python General: settling the laws,
fingering a grateful pigeon.  Left elbow crooks
the book you wrote for Princes, though, here too,
coarse rock doves sneer and are not fooled by marble.
Good luck to you!  You worked the World’s own ways
to your best ends; and the inscription finds you great:

A Virgilio — La Patria.  Your brilliant, vicious Italy!
Your modest ears would burn.
Around, Aeneas slays, and Tityrus pipes in stone; beneath
(since need finds marble irresistible)
the age has swirled its slogans round.  Your triumph runs
along a stone’s four sides:

Free L.S.D.
No more madonnas, no more whores, just women….
Assassin cops kill red brigades.
Be realists; ask everything.

Cemetery of the Capuchin Friars, Rome

Cool steps of stone beside two Central Banks
lead to a cellar, some tonnes of old friars’ bones
if you can spare ten minutes and a coin.
  Quello che voi siete, noi eravamo;
     quello che noi siamo, voi sarete.
Death’s jury’s stacked:
four hundred pairs of sockets stare you down,
each with its name in ink upon the pate,
that cage where a tongue once flapped.
Rome’s heat, the timeless bread-and-olive stalls,
fierce traffic, fade into this gloom.
Japanese graffiti on an old friar’s knee-cap.
Wood-heaps of shin-bone; pelvic shields
like tureens heaped in a cool servery;
        Comme vous nous etions; comme nous vous serez.
All tongues can let that coldness in.
No guards object: here ladies may flaunt thigh and bust;
the bones are antidote to lust.
Como vosotros nosotros eramos;
      como nosotros vosotros sereis.
Thigh bones, round-tipped like tors,
muffle the tourist children’s noise
as long-divided tongues prattle and lick
for human sameness round the bones.

   Was ihr seid sind wir gewesen;
     das was wir sind werdet ihr sein.
     As you are now, so once were we.
     As we are now, you soon will be.

Outside two tourists meet. “Darling! How are you?!”
“Well, alive.”

ABOUT THE POET

MARK O’CONNOR was born in Melbourne in 1945 and graduated from Melbourne University in 1965. He has been the Australian National University’s HC Coombs Fellow and a visiting scholar in its Department of Archaeology and Natural History. His poetry shows special interests in Italy (where he spent some years), in the Barrier Reef, and in other Australian environments. He has published 15 books of verse and is the editor of OUP’s much re-printed Two Centuries of Australian Poetry. He was Australia’s ‘Olympic poet’ for the Sydney 2000 Games, with a fellowship from the Australia Council to ‘report in verse on the Games’. Visit him at www.australianpoet.com

from issue #2: Poetry by Mark O’Connor (II)

Photo (CC) 55Laney69 @ Flickr

Japanese Garden, at the Hotel “Narita View”

1.       1st Master

Swordmaestro at ease and perfect,
he outwaits the storm
loose-sleeved in his formal garden,
under the small umbrella-shrine
there for his need on the path,
tempered sword slung in his silk sheath
at the approved angle, fierce wispy beard and eye.

Tranquil on a natural planned rock,
his feet and scabbard are placed carefully as the stone
in an age of civilised mayhem.
A servant, scurrying comic,
brings him his green-leaf tea, departs
unregarded in the rain, careful not to crush
a tuft that boils with small red ants.

2.       2nd Master

Designated plants rise in chartered tiers,
each half-clipped leaf aligned.
The green pool, residual, collects
for chill centennial carp
thin gruel of the chartered forest.
This landscape tempered as his sword,
shaped by superstitions,
corporate fauna and quisling flora,
cheers each of the owner’s Springs.

Azaleas controlled
in thick shade, scanted soil;
the labour of retainers,
draws to the eye a quiet carpet
where licit mushrooms swell.

This garden, bought with blood, drips righteousness
upon a worthless son.

Everything pleasing and placed:
trees, wives, rocks and underclass
–a military aristocracy rewards itself
with the ultimate spoil: peace.

Image of the state as garden
–far from the squalling of servants’ brats
and the silent reproach of concubines
–where lives are pruned with blade.

Calm and uncritical as a rock
nature comes, dutiful friend,
bringing no guests except sleek rooks.

3.       3rd Master

Giant carp control the lake,
wallowing,  complacent,
feed on glutinous rice,
silvery ancients reminding
how scales and fish-slime outlast dynasties.

No fishing hawks dare come
to this quiet garden where sword and gun once ruled
and now rest quietly, having drawn the line.

These fish grow ancient quickly,
plump, uneaten for centuries,
part aesthetics and partly
conspicuous non-consumption,

to prove there’s one thing, richly edible,
where this merchant won’t dip his chopsticks.

This one, the First Master’s favorite,
its subtle pattern of gold and silvered scales
congruent with the lichened rock, might yet
find favour with his great-grandson.

4.       4th Master

A man of blood sits quietly, wonders
how guts of mud-eating carp can breed
an elixir to live beyond silk and steel.
The fruit of his slayings is this
brief tenancy of garden. He survives
in the natural adjustment of two boulders.

Close by, his slaves hew paddy fields,
re-forest artifical hills of spoil,
exactly to his taste
with bright-green feathers of the giant bamboo.

Through split-bamboo pickets
just thick enough to impale a head,
the populace watch ungainly
the Master’s newly-captured deer.

5.       10th Master

The sword of money will split this valley.
A freeway, under towering silos
of the money-packaging plant
will restore some foodchains
from human use, will fence off a median strip
for butterflies, wood-ants, frogs,
and the robin whose islanded nest
no peasant child now raids.
Whims of the money serfs now trim its forests,
brace its corrected river
with rungs of concrete bridges
each straight and brutal, like a row of planks
dropped from a truck.

Two green and silver dragonflies, unfamiliar,
argue that somewhere a pool of dull water
breeds things that still live here, wild and unchosen,
simply because their ancestors did.

6. Hotel Narita View

An Airport Hotel inherits this garden
image of a state where each has his place.
Glimpsed from windows,
it will help soothe grumblings
over a bill in yen,
conduce to a recommended view
by guests overnighting here
between the continents.

Perhaps a businessman, up
too early for breakfast,
his briefcase loaded, will enter
noting a tuft beneath the umbrella shrine
and the wild red ants
foraging under the jumbos.

ABOUT THE POET

MARK O’CONNOR was born in Melbourne in 1945 and graduated from Melbourne University in 1965. He has been the Australian National University’s HC Coombs Fellow and a visiting scholar in its Department of Archaeology and Natural History. His poetry shows special interests in Italy (where he spent some years), in the Barrier Reef, and in other Australian environments. He has published 15 books of verse and is the editor of OUP’s much re-printed Two Centuries of Australian Poetry. He was Australia’s ‘Olympic poet’ for the Sydney 2000 Games, with a fellowship from the Australia Council to ‘report in verse on the Games’. Visit him at www.australianpoet.com

from issue #2: Poetry by Mark O’Connor (I)

Photo (CC) Michael Ziimmer @ Flickr

Dawn at Coopers Creek

Sliver of moon
like a feather hung in the sky

curved piece of dawn-fluff,
wafting in proto-blue.

*
A pelican’s hook-necked ship
trails a flotilla of ripples,
points his half-metre beak
at fingerlings, leaves me unthreatened.

His silent inboard
propels him at twice walking-pace.

Taking off, his wings beat water
like a stick in a bicycle wheel, then
burring free, flap loose,
freewheeling precarious over the viscous surface.

Re-lapsing, he kills speed into the water’s airbag.

*
The first bleed of yellow light into the water’s ink
makes a bankful of chiaroscuro’d trees.

The heron’s lazy butterfly-stroke
barely defeats the dawn wind.

The shallow fish-death pool
is spent-feather and fish-dropping soup.

*
Corella pairs wake softly, sidle out along a twig
their love less clamorous but as sure
as at noisy sunset.

Pelican droppings recycle fish lives
into water some say is left to waste
–might grow cotton for a thousand people.

The corellas know
about hawks, and irrelevant pelicans

where the food lies, where the wild cat hides;
but like us are concerned
with internal politics
and the contours of love

Black-edged coolibahs, redgums
against an egg-yolk rising sun.

*
Corellas at morning too quiet to mind
the intruder under their red gum
observe, concerned. Each pair in touch
from foot, to hip, to wing-shoulder.

A hawk tries to hang on sinking air, is forced to flap.
Sets them off.
Water hens steal away, two by two,
into the giant buckwheat.

Now it’s plain day. The light grants colours.
But as yet no hint of sun.

Everything waits, throbs in abeyance
for the day’s heat engine to start up.

ABOUT THE POET

MARK O’CONNOR was born in Melbourne in 1945 and graduated from Melbourne University in 1965. He has been the Australian National University’s HC Coombs Fellow and a visiting scholar in its Department of Archaeology and Natural History. His poetry shows special interests in Italy (where he spent some years), in the Barrier Reef, and in other Australian environments. He has published 15 books of verse and is the editor of OUP’s much re-printed Two Centuries of Australian Poetry. He was Australia’s ‘Olympic poet’ for the Sydney 2000 Games, with a fellowship from the Australia Council to ‘report in verse on the Games’. Visit him at www.australianpoet.com