States of Poetry Poems

The gentle hills north of Taralga
unfold as though

everything were possible. Trees
grow. Their crowns shift in the small wind

showing off new leaf tips: pink, green, a hint
of blue. The cows in the paddocks are big

and brown. They browse and stare
into space. One lays her head on her friend’s

shoulder. Their calves lollop around
getting ...

Five ducks are standing
on a narrow strip of concrete

designed to ease boats into the water.
They have their backs to me;

even so, at the sound of my steps,
they slide into the lake.

A moorhen rises up and
onto the concrete.

She raises the dark wedge of her tail
and shits a neat soft gleaming pile

then steps towards me
small ...

I’d become …
just a public pain.
Did I make you, just a little
… sick?
Make me your vampire, then –
your time.
Take my neck.
Dig deep with kisses.
Let’s feel the swirl of blood.
A country boy on Country is a power difference-making ...
Spirit flying time with eagles – where everything’s clear.
I’ll never be clear.
Not i ...

please settle me down in
the depths of the river,
scattered ash lodged
in the silt. let metal
tailings weigh, pulp
dissolve my pages
and the sparkling view
of sewage be interred;
do not let me drift out to sea.

Ben Walter

'Weight' first appeared as part of The Red Room Company's 'Disappear ...

The old dust was left behind;
it hatched crystals,
snowflakes,
a multiverse
dining with itself
around a table.

Heart twigs beat
against the breath and
winding legs patrol
a speck of flesh;
red neurons fire
the sedge, slip below
the iris of lagoon.

Shuffle the pool,
there are diamonds;
numberless suits,
...

if we are straws slurping
at this pool, it is to slake
our own thirst; we have
claimed this land as
ten thousand flagpoles
needing no flag, but
we are gentle sceptres;
a nest dispersed and
cradling paper wings.

this silt: our home,
where all legs hurry
as their days dry up;
this rot: our mother,
tadpole to sedge. and so ...

walk hard –

grains of weather glitter like the night has sunk,
streaks of thin stars, light rain sharpening the scrub;
we are small, so small in the draining sky
as squalls stroke searching for our skin.
sweat-slumped on tussocks, raw pools
smoking in the famished sun.

dragging mud across my knees,
I whip my skin with shards.
words are b ...

While we circled space,
the paint-stained grass
and the dogs in-and-out
huffing their thoughts, he’d told us
how they tried to gill our work and rest
in languid backyard bays. The bolts
in rock, firm in life and death, were now
exempt from clasping hooks to bring
the bait aboard, protected
like the tiger, like the quolls;
like rocks, we ...

Claude Monet, 1903–04

When in early morning
London fog throws its veil
of thick organdie over the Thames
dawn espouses dusk.
Confetti is spread over the town
and sequins of frosted dew glitter on the ground.
Victoria Tower, Big Ben and Central Tower
stand like gothic ghosts.

Fog
makes London beautiful
gives breadth to buil ...

The fly lands on the schoolboy's wooden desk.
The boy spots four dark strokes on the fly's thorax
and a body slightly downy.
                                             Li ...