John Ernest Tranter

Jim Gott and old money don't mix. There is
no possibility of change. He sent flowers
to the old lady, to no avail. Then he fought
the Chinese laundry over the disputed crease
...

The kids should visit a history museum
in their senior year, to understand disgrace as
one form of Clinton's victory. On the other hand
the European Community foreign debt gives
...

I was arrested because of that internal memo,
and ended up in a cell, then I was told to sit
with the police and the local bigwigs.
In the hushed and fast darkening room they said
...

The boat sprawls on the vast waste of heat.
He drops into the water, slow and heavy.
It is easy, he thinks, as though falling
from a sky brimming with rain, high above
...

she wakes into the peach-glow bedroom
like a jet / the orange lips
writhing on the taste of bitter light
the flood-green eyes / exploding hair
...

The cave exists only to be found, and the dark
waits as it has always waited. Chequered aircraft
swing around the pylons in the storm,
my girl leading. She's a good kid. Her eyes
reflect my best pair of empty grey gloves
as a pewter mirror, like the cold
gleaming on the wing. Moisture condenses
in the cave, awaiting tourists or adventurers.

Impetuous planes! The race is over,
three dead, and deep in rainy Cincinnati
the damp newsprint and the metal meet.
My girl passed through the grey parade
with honour, and her Dad clinks her medals
for luck. The Japs move in on the South Pacific.
...

It is heavy with the breath of bad images
it is more than you deserve it is easy
like a news lesson in Portuguese it has
a taste for racing alcohol and other
delicacies how lucky you are how lucky
or maybe it reads how disreputable and diseased
it is easy to read like a polka dot it is
madly in love like a silly kid good night

it cries and wastes away utterly
so trendy so paranoid and so infected
you are already sketching its obituary!
so remorseful so immense so damn evasive
while deep in the Mango Trench a team of anarchists
and so on how I love you how political
...

The Chicago Manual of Style is really neat
when your composure cracks and ghosts
of silly girls come whispering to bother you -
this happens late at night - just kids
out for a bit of fun with a convertible
and a bottle of vodka like in a movie,
and ‘Hell,' you think, ‘did I do that? Was I
involved with that mad young bitch

the cops were after down at Sunny Point?
Was that me in Dad's truck with the throttle
stuck open, cracking ninety down the beachfront?
With that . . . brunette . . . uh?' Just about then,
on the edge of love and terror, the Chicago
Manual of Style appears and takes you home.
...

The God of Smoke listens idly in the heat
to the barbecue sausages
speaking the language of rain deceitfully
as their fat dances.

Azure, hazed, the huge drifting sky shelters
its threatening weather.
A screen door slams, and the kids come tumbling
out of their arguments,

and the barrage of shouting begins, concerning
young Sandra and Scott
and the broken badminton racquet and net
and the burning meat.

Is that a fifties home movie, or the real
thing? Heavens, how
a child and a beach ball in natural colour
can break your heart.

And the brown dog worries the khaki grass
to stop it from growing
in place of his worship, the burying bone.
The bone that stinks.

Turn now to the God of this tattered arena
watching over the rites of passage -
marriage, separation; adolescence
and troubled maturity:

having served under that bright sky you may look up
but don't ask too much:
some cold beer, a few old friends in the afternoon,
a Southerly Buster at dusk.
...

Flying up a valley in the Alps where the rock
rushes past like a broken diorama
I'm struck by an acute feeling of precision -
the way the wing-tips flex, just a little
as the German crew adjust the tilt of the sky and
bank us all into a minor course correction
while the turbo-props gulp at the mist
with their old-fashioned thirsty thunder - or
you notice how the hostess, perfecting a smile
as she offers you a dozen drinks, enacts what is
almost a craft: Technical Drawing, for example,
a subject where desire and function, in the hands
of a Dürer, can force a thousand fine ink lines
to bite into the doubts of an epoch, spelling
Humanism. Those ice reefs repeat the motto
whispered by the snow-drifts on the north side
of the woods and model villages: the sun
has a favourite leaning, and the Nordic gloom
is a glow alcohol can fan into a flame.
And what is this truth that holds the grey
shaking metal whole while we believe in it?
The radar keeps its sweeping intermittent promises
speaking metaphysics on the phosphor screen;
our faith is sad and practical, and leads back
to our bodies, to the smile behind the drink
trolley and her white knuckles as the plane drops
a hundred feet. The sun slanting through a porthole
blitzes the ice-blocks in my glass of lemonade
and splinters light across the cabin ceiling.
No, two drinks - one for me, one for Katharina
sleeping somewhere - suddenly the Captain
lifts us up and over the final wall
explaining roads, a town, a distant lake
as a dictionary of shelter - sleeping
elsewhere, under a night sky growing bright with stars.
...

The kind of poetry that I needed, to teach me the use of
my own voice, did not exist in English at all;
it was only to be found in French.
- T.S. Eliot

The whole of my admiration goes to the Great Mage,
inconsolable and obstinate seeker after a mystery which
he does not know exists and which he will pursue, for ever
on that account, with the affliction of his lucid despair,
for it would have been the truth . . .
- Mallarmé



1

Sitting by the river under damp trees
I listen to the wind in the leaves
whispering hatred and loneliness: a spirit
eats into the bones of small animals, I hear
a distant roar like a crowd driven mad,
devouring itself. When it rains in the bush
you get depressed, everything's grey
and the way you live disappears leaving
a blank mind with a slight headache
clouding the edges of the view, and the view's
fucked by your understanding of history, e.g.
this is the century of indecipherable writing,
the age of impossible verse, of wrecked metal,
cancer, bad sex and epidemic syphilis,
cities flaring into cinders, machinery
sunk and rusted in the flowing stream.
So you begin a letter to a certified
criminal - dear Arthur, this is just a gesture
like a self-addressed sympathy card.
You should have been at the Poets Ball,
everyone was pissed, it was like
the Left Bank . . . The library is full of
academics, and they're reading your book!
How do you like that? When you shout
the sound plunges into the tangled bracken
and the bank of tussocks, your voice
is taken away from you and buried in the hills.


2

Reading books expands the cranial capacity
and with that extra brain you can talk
to the dead, and sometimes in another language
that takes years to decipher, for example
The old poets are drifting
back into the mist: Li Po drowned, Tu Fu
grey and dazed in the bamboo thicket -
they used to hold hands, share a blanket
in the winter, and get drunk together.
That was the T'ang Gang, in the old days,
if you survived the purges you were okay,
but you needed nerves of steel and a healthy
appetite; then battle, famine and ruin . . .
in the eighth moon of Autumn a storm
tore three layers of thatch from Tu Fu's hovel -
‘After the disasters of war,' he said,
‘I have had little sleep or rest,'
and the rain pouring through the roof.
‘Now I dream of an immense mansion,' he tells me,
‘thousands of rooms, where all the cold creatures
can take shelter, their faces alight . . . ' You
should have had such pity on the future,
or were you dreaming of the future, of the
creatures huddling under the river bank,
the rain curtain smoking low on the water?
You are a parable for what has gone wrong,
and through that mirror I see the Chinese poets
bewildered by the twentieth century like children
shocked into recognition of the distant voices,
the rain in the rain-wet boughs, the bright wind.


3

The City, the Book, these ordered lies,
it's part of a grand authoritarian design
to drive us mad, and only the Celebrations
keep us sane: the Fiesta, the Mardi Gras,
Fat Tuesday, Black Friday and the Suicide Follies,
these are our defence against the history headache,
the dialects that glitter in the bookish gloom:
mad butchers gilded out of recognition,
a simpering prince made into a man,
a man made into an idiot, and a woman burnt -
the Romans brew up a subtle broth of poison
and sign their decrees in purple ink,
athletic Greeks compose an army of homosexuals,
Egyptians unsettle the future with a
nightmare weighing a million tonnes
and the Gauls rave and blabber in the forest,
shocked by their destiny: to hack a city
out of a marauding wilderness and see
the suburbs crawling with merchants. Like
Rimbaud, in Aden, buying coffee -
Ten per cent! Ten per cent! Yet that
City's final logic is conceived by wiser men
than those who conquered with the stink of blood
in their nostrils, who spoke a military dialect
that said sophistication was a way of dying cheap
and cursed its own future in a foreign tongue.


4

A mad king plotting horror
in an overgrown field, broken steel
rusting on a hill, a plane tumbling
in the air then bursting into flame,
boys torn in half screaming,
the deliberations of important men
and their reluctant signatures
on a document that soon flickers into ash,
and a war, then another war - these nightmares
are neatly folded in the library,
stacked on the miles of shelves
waiting under the fluorescent glow.
And after that, the poetry selection.
Stop telling me to suffer! Let me do it
my way! The book trolley
trundles up and down . . . Adamson said
he went to Fisher Stacks and saw
two million books - horrible vision!
And that was only Mod. Eng. Lit.!
Sure, I want to be a great poet;
what do I do? Write lyrics for The Mob?
Kill somebody? Arthur, you
would have made a great punk rocker,
says the consolation telegram in French:
‘J'ai perdu ma vie: Rimbaud', it's obvious,
and the author catalogue agrees, i.e.
No Translations Held in Stock, see Starkie, Enid,
but I didn't go to Oxford, and I ‘have no French'.


5

After the lost generation we find the single
beatnik emerging, it's like Castaways in Space
with a drug supply at the corner store
and we're getting fresh on adrenalin milk-shakes
when the beatnik declines as a focus for the novel
and the word ‘hippie' surfaces in the dictionary.
Inside a novel is a growing boy
buried in the print and waiting to get out,
in a diary a man pretending to look
carefully at his youth, on the painting
of the famous author the fingerprints
of an unwilled and crooked politics.
I look back into myself as a visitor
looks at his room and the bowls of flowers
obviously not gathered from the garden
he can see carelessly framed in a window;
the cupboards are lined with yellowed paper
and in a trunk he finds a suit
that fashion forgot, and a broken toy
belonging to a past he never knew.
I sure could see a lot of gum trees
from our front veranda - ‘veranda',
before that was English, it was Hindi - but not
a single human being, and if I could
they'd be farmers thinking money.
You build your future out of sweat,
pain, deeply-felt experience and alcohol.
I'm thinking of ‘falling in love'.



class='menu' style='margin-top:-4px'>Next
...

I resigned to tell mother a secret sign,
insolent napkin. But it's natural to commit a crime,
the second dose of germs that make you cross,
and then the moral lapses teach us
with their beaks.

Among the crimes you botched, were you not
floating up to heaven in a frock? ‘Bless you,
bless the solemn symphony of duty.'
Grudging duty, that is, to quickly quell
a pallid polka

or pump up a yelping shiver to a spasm,
the kind that young gentleman only hear about
rattling their rusty skates among the rafters.
I came here young, able and long-shanked
and left limping.

Oh, tell it to the horse marines, that if we were
agreeable, why, we were also - just a little -
ashamed of our pink hissy fits. Thus taught,
‘Shiftless, have done for, knock and enter.'
So, knock it off.

As the slumbrous subject of heaven glares
down on us, do the children aspire to a better
pedagogy? Bless your more sensitive arm.
And I may advertise - forgive me -
a scribbled graph

that would paper over the filthy morass
to which you now offer amorous admission,
lures of tissue-paper, to clog the pale
epochs yawning on the baroque porch,
your careless greed.
...