SAMPLE POEMS
Below you can read a small sample of poems from Luke Fischer's two poetry collections A Personal History of Vision (UWAP Poetry, 2017) and Paths of Flight (North Fitzroy, VIC: Black Pepper, 2013).
Stonesfor Ellen Hinsey
‘My whole surface is turned toward you, all my insides turned away.’ ––Wisława Szymborska, ‘Conversation with a Stone’ The pebble is a perfect creature ––Zbigniew Herbert, ‘Pebble’ We generally assume they’ve no interior or soul. When we break them open they present a new exterior. They’re a fraction more than nothing: a quality of hardness, a resistance to our touch. To our sight bounded shapes: unmoving inanimate. We speak of their faces only metaphorically: lacking eyes and mouth, at most they’re blank. But sitting by this stream I’m struck by your simple presence. Meeting you the water slows and wrinkles, rushes on. Not going anywhere to you it’s all the same whether you’re clothed in moss or bare, dappled, in sun or shade. The stone is worldless, Heidegger wrote. But is this a deficiency? I agree their detachment’s perfect; they seem outside relation–– to call them you a conceit–– indifferent to our distinctions: geologic, metamorphic, igneous sedimentary, sandstone, true or false. But this afternoon as I worried about what to write and do, they and not the versatile stream, appeared as sage––in the world beyond the world, as though they were primeval Buddhas who attained complete humility and sunken in meditation hardly noticed death–– only an increase in light. "Stones" appears on pp. 92-93 of A Personal History of Vision and also appeared in The Best Australian Poems (2017). |
Metamorphosis
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Turtles
…we currently have too much humanness in the world:
too many things reflect humans, mirror humans… ––Martin Harrison Glancing through a palm frond’s arch, you notice a bonsai mountain range on an island in the pond–– five summits of igneous rock. One sun-lacquered dome detaches, treads towards the water… You find yourself a place to sit beside the liquid sky, its tundra and blue gorges. The afternoon slows to the tempo of his walk, drawing you back to childhood hours lost in play, and further still beyond your memory. You sense the age of granite in the almost glacial advance. In water, Aesop doesn’t apply. Waving to the left and right he seems to be heading nowhere in labyrinthine turns… Until his head protrudes and he looks at you with dark sleepy eyes. On the reptilian face and long black neck run veins of yellow lava. You wonder if there was a time when the turtle’s skin was soft. Did it gradually wrinkle in water? Or is he a sensitive soul who suffered an early trauma, grew the scaly epidermis as bodily armour? In the design you trace the line of vertebrae. How did he turn interior scaffolding into a mobile home? So now whenever he pleases he’s able to withdraw. You note that if the turtle could sing he’d be a basso profundo. No, deeper than any bass he would chant with an order of Tibetan monks. Though he doesn’t seem to know it (perhaps he couldn’t care less), in tune again with the Zeitgeist the turtle’s a progressive: totem of the slow revolution, ambassador of poetry. He submerges. The yellow lilies rising from the surface–– radiant spectres. A poplar standing against the violet-streaked sky already absorbs night into foliage. Hearing a creak you turn around––the garden gates closing. "Turtles" appears on pp. 87-89 of A Personal History of Vision. |
Grasshopper in a FieldWho took the young thin stems
and bent them to be your legs, folded leaves like origami to make a pair of wings? I found you: a green ear of wheat mounting a stalk, a walking plant, self-enclosed, unbound from the soil, early sentience at home in your hall of mirrors. "Grasshopper in a Field" appears on page 17 of Paths of Flight and was first published in Antipodes (USA). |
Band of Cockatoos
The white of their plumage
seems a bit too white like the polished teeth of salesmen or the glare of the sheet on which I jot these observations though they remind me of children as they quietly collect twigs and leaves from around the path. Now and then they reveal the wattle in their underwings and open their gravel beaks like rusty doors but suddenly the lead alights and hops along a broken branch, flares his pineapple Mohawk while banging his head, rends his jacket and insists the members scatter to the surrounding tiers where they join in a punk-rock cacophony. I hasten from the rally push the scribbly paper into a pocket. Across the valley I spot them vandalising their angophora houses. "Band of Cockatoos" appears on page 22 of Paths of Flight and was first published in Meanjin. |
Syrian Desert
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I walk off alone
through the hot winds that flap my clothes like the broken sail of a dhow beaten by storms on the Red Sea, across the ochre sands and scattered rocks and past the caves where desert fathers once dwelled and prayed. My eyes settle before the calm expanse, trace the subtle gradation of hues and up ahead I see a man cloaked in the winds; his face is dry and cracked yet tilled by the work of renunciation––from its furrows rise vast trees abundant with flowers and gliding the blazing gusts firebirds alight in their branches. "Syrian Desert" appears on page 44 of Paths of Flight. |
Flamenco Trio
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Granada |
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An old man sits at the rear of a dusky cavern,
dressed in a suit and hot pink tie. He listens intently to the dexterous fingerwork of the young guitarist on his left, mining with his ears for something that might appear behind the notes. Every now and then he claps and rubs his thick hands together, as if warming them before a fire. As an earthquake sends tremors through the earth, his mouth sends a wail through the walls––like a Tibetan chant or the clang of a gong––summoning oscillations that first made stone, stone. The man to his right is roused like a giant from sleep. Towering over a half-created world he raises his arms, greets the morning sun. Kyanite eyes peer down into a crystalline earth and he stamps out countless valleys. The guitarist continues to strum, fans a breeze through summer fields into the chamber where we sit: hearing the scents of wild flowers that open in the night. "Flamenco Trio" appears on page 34 of Paths of Flight. |
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Here is a link to the poem "Augury?" (included in Paths of Flight among other poems relating to Greece, and winner of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize): "Augury?"
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