LUKE FISCHER
Poet - Writer - Scholar
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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). 

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

I’ve woken from deep sleep and forgotten who I was, am. All I recall is an atmosphere of green, darkness, then incandescence. My mouth is strange––long and delicate as a pistil. My legs are spindly––comical stilts made from dried stems. Reaching out from my head, twin filaments sense vibrations, and far above my lean body extend four immense flat things. A man is admiring them, says they’re more beautiful than the rose window in Chartres, compares them to an emperor’s fan from the 16th century displayed in the museum of Taipei. A girl beside him says they match one of the blossoms pressed in her book. I don’t know what they mean or what to do with these things.


"Metamorphosis" appears on page 69 of A Personal History of Vision.

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 Field

Who 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

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

Granada

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.


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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