SAMPLE POEMS
Below you can read a small sample of poems from Luke Fischer's three poetry collections A Gamble for my Daughter (Vagabond Press, 2022), A Personal History of Vision (UWAP Poetry, 2017) and Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013).
On the Pre-Socraticsfor Clara
It’s been said that language separates us from being, abstracts us from immersion in immediacy, but I see you dwell in the logos as a fish in the sea––an encompassing element virtually imperceptible––though as yet venturing only as far as your rock pool’s boundaries. Your talent for imitation, its astonishing precision, assumes the shape of a new expression, ‘no way’, uttered on the fly, not intended for your ears, as trickling water quickly gathers in a groove. You kick off your shoes just ‘like Daddy does’, hold a pen correctly as though you’d attended school and ‘write’ zigzag letters that are not a bad rendering of my almost illegible hand, as though our actions were a coursing river––our bodies its bed––and the water, remembering, flowed on as a tributary in what you do––fractal reflections on different scales as river systems, alveoli, blood vessels, leaf veins all display the branching patterns of water. But the clarity of your gaze suggests a still lake (more than a river), mirroring the particulars of its surroundings, wherein we recognise things we hadn’t noticed about ourselves. You join words into phrases, sentences, each distinct yet undivided as dispersed droplets on a table–– holding the same surface tension–– swiftly reunite in a tiny puddle. Like a young Nereid presiding over shoals, you love to sit in the bath, scoop and pour water from vessel to vessel. In short, confirming Thales: Everything is water. Yet the spark in your eyes and gestures, brightening each day, how, like a torch, you grasped the word ‘light’ (and the Arabic daw ضَوْء) and could thenceforth distinguish the oddest wall lamp and a chandelier, candles, lanterns and sunshine as so many instances of the one ‘light’––with the fire of the logos you had lit up that room in the mansion of forms housing every possible illumination. In quick succession further referents ignited: ‘star’, ‘moon’, ‘sun’ ‘flower’, ‘stone’, ‘sculpture’ ‘water’ (soon evaporated), ‘table’, ‘telephone’, enveloped by a spreading wildfire, rose into the sky as flashing fireflies, increasing the multitude of stars that orient your world. According to water’s babble language is ‘acquired’ but tongues of fire declare every word is seized by leaping flame, dry wood devoured until it’s wholly fire. Perhaps the first word you uttered (even before ‘light’) was ‘no’–– no to the way of opinion (and the puree we tried to spoonfeed you as, mouth sealed, you shook your head)–– our way, that of the old gods soon to be overthrown. ‘By yourself!’, ‘by yourself!’ is your insistent refrain (addressing yourself from a god’s-eye view) whenever we attempt to lend a hand––whether in putting on your shoes or climbing steep stairs–– and, unwaveringly, you make us redundant in one or another task. This burning determination like a spot fire recalls the defiant wisdom of Heraclitus, The Obscure (the Beethoven of ancient thought) who having found truth deposited his manuscript at the Temple of Artemis indifferent to whether others could decipher his riddles. You were two-and-a-half-feet tall with an eight-foot personality, a candle stub with a disproportionate wick, when speaking with your mother I named you with the epithet ‘the sweet dictator’. Thus it is manifest: everything is fire! But I’ve forgotten to mention ‘air’: how you dance on your tippy-toes, come out of your sleeping-cocoon and flutter through the living room as a butterfly. And your earthiness too: playing with dirt and sand, or feigning a tantrum by slowly crawling as a weary traveller with a burdensome load then sobbing flat on the ground until the moment when you get your way and rise again like flame, only seeming to be quenched in ash. "On the Pre-Socratics" appears on pp. 54-57 of A Gamble for my Daughter and also appeared in the 2020 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology. |
Stones
for 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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