Unfurl 2 Peter Lach-Newinsky

Peter LACH-NEWINSKY
Poetry
Contents
About Peter LACH-NEWINSKY
Bee suite [bitter honey
Post-Post-Modernist Quartet
Bog Transcestrals, a movie
Dust Ode
Prancing in the Apocalypso
The Way They Moved
The Sapling
After yet another warning from scientists about the impending end of the world
Some days you can feel it slipping
Thoughts at a Funeral
The Knee Monologues
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Peter LACH-NEWINSKY, unfurl /2 1

About Peter LACH-NEWINSKY
Peter’s three poetry books are Cut a Long Story Short (Puncher & Wattmann 2014), Requiem
(Picaro Press New Work 2012) and The Post-Man Letters & Other Poems (Picaro Press New Work
2010). His awards include the Varuna-Picaro Publishing Fellowship Prize (2009), the Melbourne
Poets Union International Poetry Prize (2009 and 2010) and the Vera Newsom Poetry Prize
(2011). Published in Best Australian Poetry 2015, he has also been twice shortlisted for the
Newcastle Poetry Prize, and been runner-up or commended in the Overland Judith Wright
Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Poetry Prize, the
Shoalhaven Literary Award.
Peter lives with his wife Barbara in Bundanoon in the southern highlands of New South Wales.
Their 20 acre working property is designed along permaculture lines and includes 120 heritage
apple varieties.

Bee suite [bitter honey
Our minds buzz like bees

but not the bees’ minds.
It’s just wings not heart
they say, moving to another flower.
—Jim Harrison, After Ikkyu and Other Poems No.1
1.
Honey is sweet spit collected in a million

trips to the moon & back. Blue borage
moons whitely sexual lemon blossoms

laid out like Manet’s Olympia
or lassoed lowly clover we threaded

into childhood’s chains on Palmer Street.
2.
Sylvia parked the ute, puffed up a cloud

of pine needle & cow shit in her smoker
& off we went, me trailing in my bright

new veil, trembling virginal apiarist.
A few more puffs, the top’s off.

An altar of quivering bees pours out
its electric golden light. These

are not separate.
3.
To approach the beehive without fear,

make your mind into one.
Like mother or queen bee mind,

your emptiness must contain
the golden swarm of neurons

that sync into nectar, pollen, honey
shimmer like vibrating leaves of yellow

light pulsing energy into one voice
buzzing on the reciprocal waves

of their sundry moods. Listen closely.
Slow your buzzing thoughts down-

wards into your navel, hands
gently lifting each frame

weighted with a different promise.
Inspect with quiet disinterest,

subdued greed honeyed with tact
despite the odd crushed bee

around gluey rims & joins,
the dallying clusters ignoring

all your soft & toxic exhalations.
4.
gassed, burned
my cankered bees
now eucalypts bloom
5.
on the ocean wastes

of their orchards, fields
they found the boats empty

food still on the table

brood intact, an eerie
foreboding listing with
silent summer, the compass

needle spinning slowly
home suddenly a receding

coastline of unfathomable loss
[Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Prize winner 2010]

Post-Post-Modernist Quartet
1.
When Positivism Hit Poetry
When positivism hit poetry

the traffic lights turned grey.
The moon, that plain silver spoon

with the handle missing au fait,
became a lump of cosmic rock

banned from further speaking.
Birds flapped ornithologically

while readers chewed gum.
The mice of metaphor,

lobotomised, turned treadmill
tricks in fashionable runs

as sex became a shopping list
and shopping lists became sexy.

The usual cavalries of cliques
charged into the shadows

of their imagination, fighting
the usual wars over biscuits and piques.

Meanwhile, the sun rose and next
the sun set, the sun rose, shining

like an undiscovered text.
2.
The 19th Hole is not a great place for poetry
because alpha beta omega eggplants

sliding surfaces in glistening skins
of gaze do nothing for Slim Dusty
or Eric the Eel and that’s good
enough for me or the poetic experience

syntaxing itself into surfeits of graphemes
cascading down like a pair of tits
on Born Losers wrapped around
the dancing blue poles of the sublime

that morph their signs into the Sunset
Boulevard of late capitalism’s dream
as I look for a hamburger
in my Che shirt, a girl or even

meaning in a golf ball dimpled
for better flight into the 19th hole
of the eternal neon golfer
on Elizabeth Street because the dimples

set little vortextual voids humming away
the drag like on shark’s skin
or the mind in Derrida, that’s why.
3.
The Epistemology of Sunrise
I’m not sure,

but it’s possible
that the sun is rising.
Is that bird singing,

I wonder,
or just signifying birdness?
The sky seems

indifferent,
perhaps, to that cloud
passing through,

or is it in,
it. Let me
re-phrase that
in a more
tentative way:
the sky seems

perhaps indifferent
to that cloud
passing through,
or is it in,
it. I think
that’s all I,
potentially, felt
like saying.
Although,
I could be
wrong.
4.
sonnet for ern elmbury in a dark mirror
To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.

—T.W. Adorno, ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’
It may be objected that from this point

of view anything goes. Actually
anything does go, - but only when
nothing is taken as the basis.
— John Cage, ‘45’ for a Speaker’
the blind medicine man controls grief’s vanity

or your look as it intercepts the picture. Lustra,
your beak. contortions of ebb tides circulate sanity
over balustrades a moon rejects vowels, pudenda

of pomegranates. hold the boundary of your tortoise
eyes proclaim everything is surface. ladder talk, fragility.
the poetics of exclusion and hot dogs, salivate buckets:
original i grapheme of wind and wave tranquillity
pipe dream itself now, prevarications jewel. Daffo-

dills’ convex curvatures cave the sun is a rose is
sublime again tinnitus warp time episteme
the ocean falling upwards like snow, or Hiro-

shima subjectivity cathects stasis in moment whorls, yet.
reciprocity is knives in a kitchen, or owls at dusk.
Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award 2009 third prize.

Bog Transcestrals, a movie
1. The Slap of History
flashback & I’ve been told both grandfathers leave their bog-bound farms in the tsunami of
cities gathering might when Capital strikes rich baby rich yeah its factories coal oil manning the
pumps of accumulation Marx first spells out getting his piles writing Das Kapital in the British
Museum, factory cities Mammon like Ginsberg howled pumping moneyed nothings into safes &
banks vampiric numbers now re-make the world into an image of its stern & glittering nothing
self going round the bend of more baby more till it all peaks now in wanky machines & melting
poles
that’s the intro folks now let’s zoom in on Russian grandad Arkady going to cadet school
learning to time trajectories of horse-drawn guns getting posted to Siberia where he meets his
Lydia a merchant’s lass from Penza a little below his class whence my daddy’s born an only
child & difficult birth that both become the family tune & Lydia according to the genteel breast-
droop wont farms out my infant dad to peasants’ wives for breast milk & a bit of bond, suck on
that dad, while mornings he’ll kiss the back of her out-stretched hand & not see her again till
bed; & by the way Arkady also has a lot to do
so anyway we’re building up to it as they travel the land as armies do but never home to his
White Russian place that still sits millennial proud prosaic as history on a rise above its old serf
villages it has sucked lean as ribs for centuries
& that’s where the slap comes in
because Lieutenant-colonel A. L-N also teaches his Tsar’s peasant soldiers how to read & write &
add & one day he asks a soldier the sum of two plus two & he answers: five & he asks again &
the soldier repeats: five, & looks him in the eye & Arkady returns the look, then slaps him in the
face
cut
so this is where I pan out & howl & wonder does the ancient rock on which the manor sits at
Lachi sigh & subtly crack at that moment when millennia of oppression issue without thought
from peasant eye & gentry hand, a peasant soldier spits out the bitter truth of their inverted lives
where nothing adds up but lies I wonder is the red cockerel already shaking its fire feathers in
the wings of a bloody dawn rolling with armies, heads, justice, revenge as in some montage of
Eisenstein’s I have never seen
whatever; the manor is razed in the revolution
fade out now let me tell you not a trace remains but a grey rock in a white expanse of
radioactive snow edged by firs whispering unintelligibly in the wind, or so I’ve heard

2. Sweetness & Bite
pan out west there is that other old family farm squatting in the flat-heath
peat land of Oldenburger Münsterland boggy, sparsely treed & Catholic
as hell whence young grandad Heinrich escapes to Berlin before
the first great imperial war to push round numbers
in a bank
flash forward today bathroom taps of gold smugly grace the penned
factory of overfed cattle, pigs whose shit mountains render water
cancerous, puffers ubiquitous in the asthmatic night. Back
at the Belgian front Heinrich pushes round numbers
in logistics where he meets Charlotte, eighteen,
fleeing father, volunteering
for the fatherland
zoom in father Eugene is a Calvinist diabetic with a chocolate factory

in Berlin sucking cocoa from slaves made invisible in the colonies
which kills him when he loses it to the times bread, chocolate cost
a barrow-load of marks; levelled by capital’s inflation guillotine
his widow Anna runs a corner store while daughter Charlotte,
newly wed, watches, horrified, as revolutionary soldiers rip
epaulets off an officer on the street
& her world collapses
– flash forward as she tells you this in her tiny kitchen in sixty nine,
the packing case kindling gleaned from the supermarket roaring
in the stove, you blush to cover the pirate copy
of History and Class Consciousness
you’ve just bought with
her money
back then she practises drawing room elocution with accompanying pianist,
chases your little mother into the pantry & belts the crap out of her
because she laughed. Your mother is still there stealing love’s
biscuits, working in cake shops, a sugar-addicted diabetic
whose heart-most breast mostly empty of the sweet milk
of human kindness fills with growths & is severed.
When Heinrich splits & the marriage crashes
just before the Great Crash, grandma
Charlotte, dead with shame,

tells your six year-old
mother to say
(close-up)
he’s dead
she never hears from him again, her only remaining token a memory
of his rescuing her home to the soothing rock of the garden swing
from a children’s party where they’ve all been given flower names:
she got Stiefmütterchen: ‘little step-mother’, pansy, a fatal
Freudian fusion, sudden Grimm truth that is much too
much to bear. This Charlotte is the only grandparent
you ever know. For a while you share a room in
Palmer Street where you play I spy in German
& now she is long dead in an unmarked slot
in some unknown cemetery wall in
Munich that might as well be
(fade) on the moon
Newcastle Poetry Prize shortlist 2010.

Dust Ode
Ashes to ashes…
Dry depositions of death, circular detritus of stars

& planets, your siftings get up my nose
at dawn & I know it’s time to look under the bed
for the mouse-like mutations you meld into hair,

tumbleweed down long waxed corridors pursued
by futile armies of underpaid sorcerers’ apprentices
wielding brushes, brooms, vacuum cleaners,

Dettol each dreary day to do battle with entropy,
ultimate ruler of our median roost.
Any finer & you’ll laugh your airy way

through the hairy defences of my nose
to defoliate the wide, fine-branched universe
of my lungs’ inverted breathing tree: cement,

lime, diesel do their tumour-teasing tricks
to land me, strangled, in your final bath.
Winds lift your ploughed continents into the sea,

wide blue omens of bruised air roiling their wounds
over cities, charged with death & cloud universes
of bacterial life, beetles, spiders hitching rides

to colonise new islands rising from oceans
like volcanic humpbacks singing into wind.
Enter a study & you are there, as must,

addictive homely musk of mould, book lice,
sweet lotus smell to the reading mind.
How lightly you lift in sudden shafts of light,

diamond specks of rising air, a zillion
un-dead souls dancing with gravity, grave
mother of us all, for moments of open-mouth

wonder, overcome by those fine ashes made of us
circling through galaxies, rocks & roots.
Vera Newsom Poetry Prize 2011 winner; republished in Australian Award Winning Writing 2012.

Prancing in the Apocalypso
Blessed is he that readeth […] for the time is at hand.

—Revelations 1:3
The Red Horse
I start early. In the womb, say,

throttled by smoke, attacked
by toxins, starved by ignorance

or lack of love. Nowhere to flee,
nothing to fight, just float there

helpless, tossed between demons
of fear & rage. Then one day

I’ve got an AK-47, tank, small
red button that fries thousands.

Further training tramps through
home, school, church, factory, all

the cosy prisons of the just. My
love is flags, memorials, marching,

rousing words that froth & kill.
I sit in your skulls like a skull

till they’re dead, read history
books smirking at the heroics,

clever generals playing live chess,
complete absence of my terrors,

blowflies around dispersed limbs.
I’m the only bro who looks good

on a horse. E-coli, hunger on hooves,
I don’t think so. They should get off

their high horses, admit they’re mere
foot-soldiers to this warrior’s whims.

Even as I wait in their hungry guts
they prepare or follow me. Look

how I make you human, an animal
that eats ideas, kills for them, then,

dismembered, forgets them for oh,
mother on dying lips. Your peace is

warlike. I thrive on your boredom,
fear & fecklessness. Obedience

is my given name, disobedience
the only enemy I cannot defeat.
The Pale Horse
When I first come you may mistake me

for a mood, could be mere resonance
of a bad wind, upper level disturbance,

some magnetic pimple of the moon,
maybe the dragging undertow the daily

news sinks into your day, something
you ate for lunch shipped two thousand k.

I lurk in travel, crowding, starvation, sex
& really love my brother’s preparations,

war. Once I get going, the suffering
is fairly democratic. I can play all

the parts of your bodies’ symphony
in my arpeggios of waste & blood, frost

& fever, vomit & sweet delusions

of bright angels at the end of tunnels.
Once I’ve got your herd panicked,
I prefer to sink my unseen fangs into

the young & old. Even as you escalate
your arms against me, you disarm

yourself in popping tablets & feeding
them to your meat. Protean guerrilla,

I’ll always win as long as you believe
in bluster, big guns, occupying

every vacant niche of this commons
you don’t wish to share. My fine

& lethal spread exactly matches yours.
The Black Horse
My three brothers are all too fat,

their hunger for heads too obvious.
Look, anybody can let loose rats,

locusts, pull a trigger. My way is leaner,
more efficient. I sit inside money

& the invisible machinery of class.
Even my dreadlocked sisters Drought

& Flood can now be called up
by Power’s palls from mall, jet & stack.

The fatter one world waxes, the more
the other wanes. I can come on tip-toes

or erupt the place into bleaching bones,
drip hunger like debt & time between tin,

fibro, hardiplank, waste a landscape

swirling dust. Riding markets, mad leaders
inscribing their progress on human flesh,
I am the first fear in the bones of the poor,

last fear of insurrection in the rich.
The White Horse
My tongue is a silver mirror, double-

headed axe looking like Janus
forward & back. Love me, hate me,

I squat inside your shadows
like a jewel-headed toad.

I croak the lies you think truth
the truths you call lies & twist

them into the shroud you see
as light. I am the contrary knot

that makes you dumb & whole.
You follow me as lions & lambs,

seek security, risk, hot pheromones
of belonging, the certain rapture

of the select. A man of peace
I come dispensing those toxic vials

of war & goodness that promise
victory over figments you project.

I am the saviour who destroys,
playing your inverse insides

like a little boy with toys.
Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award 2011 second prize.

The Way They Moved
In the whorehouses on the dead outskirts of the River Plate, hard men invented the tango blind
with the boredom of waiting for their taciturn turns of consolation & grind
In Rio’s pulsing carnivals rolling out from the lower depths regional black rhythms fused
into pelvic ecstasies of sex & life that became the samba’s sinuous muse
In, yes, Perdido Street in1906 New Orleans five-year-old Satchmo watched, listless, from a
window
down onto poverty & nothing-new till one day from a corner Billy Bolden blew
his party- & funeral-raising horn at the sky encircled by clapping, singing, dance, &, shaking
with sound, almost fell from the window into his calling called jazz, soul quaking
with the bold cornet of a phantom called Billy soon sectioned in the Negro Section
where he died unknown, unrecorded, round the time the Street crashed all connection,
the unemployed queued, workers marched into red, black or brown, & jazz
became big band, respectable & white.
When the black & white students of the sixties went south to sit-in segregated cafes
& be fire-hosed or mauled by police dogs, a reporter held a mike to a local young black
& asked what had prompted her to join these blow-ins from the north:
it was the way they moved, she said,

the way they moved
In ‘68 it was somatic conviction that convinced our eye & gut
long before any clever word hit the expectant brain, an inward dance propelled
by black pulsations of hip & spine, the blues, rock-and-roll, the saxy free jazz
of struggle that infused the opening horizons of our blue-note night
it was the way they moved

the way they moved
Even in the most rarefied branching of the live & leaderless symphony of the human tree
poetry sings the melodic line above the sustained bass of sweat & struggle,
toil & tenderness, debate & dance, moving like wheat fields in the cross-winds
of history, memory, calm animations of dignity, upright refusal
to doff caps, tug forelocks, sit at the back of the bus

the way they moved
Even through filigreed Bach, Beethoven, Schönberg, through Whitman, Rilke, Neruda
the subtle ear may hear the thud of peasant feet, hammer & beat of working hands,
poetic cadence in the rise & fall of civilisations, spiral dance of humanity’s long dark
quest towards itself, driving propaganda of the lowly deed, feet stomping in struggle
rock & rolling with the planet exfoliating its potentials powered by the progress
of the cyclic sun revolving around nothing, no one, but itself

the way they moved
Even within the nine-second cage Mrs H. had to weld one

of the three thousand one hundred & forty daily tubes,
she had, over the dead vast of years, maintaining her piece-rate,
found the tiny seed of freedom’s breath: for a micro-second
her arm & shoulder briefly winged upwards
in one totally superfluous movement of her own
one invisibly angelic movement of her own
Second prize Shoalhaven Literary Award 2012.

The Sapling
(Australia’s First Press Photograph)
There are eight men, two young boys,

a door, wall, white leafless sapling,
possibly a birch. It is sepia-cold in de-treed
Benalla, although the only man wearing
a bushman’s hat is shirtless: sweating
from the job, the moleskin jacket draped
on a branch could be his. A gentleman
in a bowler has turned to us, hands warming
in the pockets of his posh overcoat,
an official note- or artist’s sketchbook
tucked under his arm in case that new
contraption doesn’t do its job. The younger
boy’s face has, perhaps caught truanting,
also blurred towards us. One of the men
is black, perhaps a tracker working
for the police. Only two men have no hats.
One is hunched under the camera’s hood

a few feet from the other. He, young Joe Byrne,
seems frozen in a dance at the door, boot tips
just touching the ground, white boyishly
bearded face cocked quizzically, surprised
at that dark sap on his groin under
the tight rope stringing up his corpse.
Previously published in Best Australian Poems 2015, ed. Geoff Page, BlackInc Books.

After yet another warning from scientists about the impending end of the
world
Let’s look around the place, here, this farmlet,

southern highlands, late October in a year records are again broken.
I still don’t understand it. Even as I prattle on to visitors
of its few successes, many failures. Can I really see it?
Always that film of ideas, memories, comparing, imagining, like veils of mists
coming up from Bundanoon’s deep gorges, channelling the Tasman
up through sandstone ravine funnels hitting high coolth
to merrymake mushrooms, mood magic, droplet cobwebs, bee diseases.
Mostly though, wheeling skyscapes pushed by westerlies

from sandy ebbtide cirrus to rolling king-tides of cumulus
backlit by sunsets like last sputterings of some senescing fire somewhere
invisible just over the horizon blocked by tangents of trees.
Night tends to fall like a sentence, stars its letters

spelling patterns we no longer see. How to explain this longing
for something else? Something not to be measured in algorithms,
there and not there, central and peripheral, a bend in unbeing
bending you into Is. The Southern Cross wheels yet is always going south.
Although the buddleias have unbloomed, woodwhites, jezebels
still jinx and suck. Our slow-dying dog Billy stumbles in to beg for food,
his remaining passion as his legs give way, lungs rasp
louder towards some crescendo-diminuendo I am avoiding. Ask not

for whom the bowl empties, it empties for thee.
Soundscapes around here always mix machine, mind and wild,
the steady techno of swamp frog, dull sigh of plane or train
receding into the comforting abstractions of distance.

Magpies, ravens chase away raptors and are praised daily
in the rabbits’ subterranean temples. One rifle blast and I can wait
at least twenty minutes before another whiskers the air.
It would be nice to say these rodent moon-makers were my roshis

in patience and detachment from headcount and slow-cooked stew.
Farming is about killing things. Killing ancestors that made us.

Some say the expiation comes from preparing the food
with heart, mind in the right place. I wouldn’t bet on it.

Apparently some Buddhist cold-climate carnivores
foist the karma onto the man with gun and knife. No one’s perfect.
I used to only eat meat I’d killed, riding out the sheep’s
spurting spasms after I’d slit its throat. Getting too old for that, so now
it’s also others’ organic because it builds the soil. But who knows.
Vegan seems cleaner, thus suspect, and I’d miss the bloody mystery
of dark resurrection and dying-to-live.
This spring, with days of welcome wind-shifting curtains of drizzle

heading off another record drought, there’ve been more small birds.
Waves of yellow-rumped thornbills seem to share the insected grass,
trunks and air with red-browed firetails, the odd restless flycatcher
outwinging their flanks. For the first time variegated fairy wren,
spotted pardalote have sat at our sill demanding entrance
to our forbidden cave. May the tiny star-speckled wonders of their eggs
rest safe some place unknown to the winged, sharp-beaked
brains gracing the sleek black shoulders of corvids and butcher birds.
How much longer before the dark angel of blindness
touches my maculate eyes with his immaculate feather? I can feel him
shuffling in the wings. Will I navigate the final times
in the new tough light of sound, sense and senseless,

the metallic whir of robotic drones replace the oneiric buzzing of bees?
Previously published in Cordite 95 EARTH, online 1 February 2020.

Some days you can feel it slipping
i.m. B. 1947–2012
Making coffee this morning, a black jumping spider like

a smudged M in 12 pt Arial moseyed along the plastic lid
of the electric kettle. As small clouds of steam began
to exhale from the spout, it drew inquisitively closer.
Buffeted at the volcano edge, it suddenly threw itself off
the towering metal cliff and, cushioned by its invisible
abseil, landed safely on the benchtop and slipped away.
These days the day may leap from its deep womb of sleep
texting new writing ideas, phrases, connections. Then
as the sun speeds west the hours harden into well-worn
tracks, texts, tantrums. There’s the old withdrawal
into reading, writing, all the silent pleasures of the mindful
realms, soul-speak, the words’ magic crooks and crannies,
tempered by tending two ebullient grandsons or the summer
orchard wild with birds and fruit. Books lured me early
from some grey ache I never quite understood, fantasy
more real than the real I met, dense with meaning missed.
Yesterday, I learned my first love had died, sixty-five.

Cancer. Diagnosed five years ago in the same wind-torn
winter I was, just after collusion and a tsunami melted
a reactor in Japan. This weighs on me like an invisible cloud
heavy with isotopes. She married, divorced, as we lost
contact, separated by hemispheres and diverging hopes.
Now I am that young, undying ghost forever breathing

her skin under the fine tent of her hair on the university
lawns, skipping lectures, filled with the first intensities
of our merging mouths, with love and those cellular codes
of scrambled letters untexting our far futures deep within.
Driving our slowly dying dog Billy for a huffing-and-puffing

walk half up the bush track we once ran along, this morning
old Dotty paused on the asphalt to let me pass. Long struck
by stroke, rain, hail or shine she slowly pushes herself shaking
along the roads, a walking stick-insect with a stick. Dogged

to move, determine her own direction, pushing her strong
will against the sliding slope of time, frail heroine
in floral hippy silk, bent forward into the indifferent wind.

Thoughts at a Funeral
Time is all the moments when life happened, the sudden

sweep of soughing in the she-oaks against a wide-open blue
stretched with cirrus, your mother’s mouth in death’s rictus
in room 104, the smell of your dog muzzling your knee, softly
shooting his warm eyes at yours, the way your hand fused
with the smooth boulder of your lover’s hip as inside became
a sphere of water translucent with sun & meaning, the shuttlecock
at Collaroy beach still flying between a young father & the boy
writing this, the dreams of a lifetime dancing together like a wave

of starlings to settle into the watery pages of some great ethereal
book still firmly bound with seven seals… all these mirror shards of
fleeting innermost that make up the movement of mind & moment
buried with your body, unknowable to those left throwing sand

& bouquets, celebrating, we say, what we consider your life.

The Knee Monologues
Coming to receive from us

Knee-tribute yet unpaid, prostration vile.
—Milton, Paradise Lost, V, 778-9
1.
we’re concave convex like the universe all your strength centred in us as long as you’re upright
and not a stiff but springing like a jack or jill in the box in the tilting toy shops of life that’s why
you go weak in us when lust hits your eye balls you’re neither hot nor cold or you’re falling from
a skyscraper as the brakes fail or you get your maths marks we can even flip the fifties into the
sixties by dimply flashing ourselves from under the new lift of a hemline at the races like jean
shrimpton and bring down the empire of lamingtons white gloves hats doilies smoking picket
fences sheila-free pubs and god save the queen at the cinema stand up straight chest out hats off
march in line six of the best short back and sides lest we forget the iron knee days the bended
knee days the attention stand at ease days the odd tight red tunic topped by a furry pyramid of a
black bear hat keeled over on the pavement like christine under a minister as she passes by
equally oblivious to her knees that rule the world my brothers and sisters the great kneedom of
hinges that silently swing the body’s door midgard between ground and sky until we slowly rust
and freeze into walking frames wheelchairs finally flatten our concavity down into the depravity
of the homely soil our convex bit discretely embalmed in white silk eyeing off the receding
heavens as we fall legless into space
2.
young we bounce children

through the trampolines
of their days
in the evenings
on the nature strip
they squat happily
exhausted
from the exciting
tragedies, timelessness
of serious play
rest their heads on us
breathe in
the sweet smell

of our daily fading
fusion of sweat and bliss

we contain the forgotten
chemicals that bind them
to themselves
3.
growing we closely connect

to our cousins
the elbows
we’re proudly grounded

in ankle, calf and thigh
while our little friends
have just got forearm

biceps and shoulder
to play with
they’re all up in the air

like swings
or air guitars
half the time

the other half
getting calluses
it’s all that resting

heads on tables
and shunting
their determined way

through the hard
jelly of the world
of course to spite us
they say
their concave bit
is especially sexual
but that’s just because
most mouths

seldom come
down to us
to test the waters
of our suppleness
they would be
surprised
4.
of course we too
can be callused
to buggery
you just try scrubbing

floors on us
all your life
for the gentry

to go gliding
over tippy-toe
waltz away
their willed ignorance
of our suppressed
and lowly state

that keeps them
in the largesse
of their powdered
ankles and sexy
soft silks
5.
and just for the record

we were there in 69
on the moon too
felt the impact

of his big leap
for man-unkind
reverberate
up from his big
boofy boot
Armstrong, my foot
strong KNEES
are what landed him
in that fine dust

he later violated
with a flag
Commended in the Overland Judith Wright New and Emerging Poets Prize 2009.

Unfurl 2 Peter Lach-Newinsky

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Peter LACH-NEWINSKY

Bee suite [bitter honey

Bog Transcestrals, a movie

Prancing in the Apocalypso

The Way They Moved

Some days you can feel it slipping

The Knee Monologues

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Peter LACH-NEWINSKY, unfurl /2 1

Peter LACH-NEWINSKY, unfurl /2 2

Our minds buzz like bees

Honey is sweet spit collected in a million

moons whitely sexual lemon blossoms

or lassoed lowly clover we threaded

Sylvia parked the ute, puffed up a cloud

& off we went, me trailing in my bright

A few more puffs, the top’s off.

its electric golden light. These

To approach the beehive without fear,

Like mother or queen bee mind,

Peter LACH-NEWINSKY, unfurl /2 3

the golden swarm of neurons

shimmer like vibrating leaves of yellow

buzzing on the reciprocal waves

Slow your buzzing thoughts down-

gently lifting each frame

Inspect with quiet disinterest,

despite the odd crushed bee

the dallying clusters ignoring

now eucalypts bloom

on the ocean wastes

they found the boats empty

Peter LACH-NEWINSKY, unfurl /2 4

silent summer, the compass

home suddenly a receding

[Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Prize winner 2010]

Peter LACH-NEWINSKY, unfurl /2 5

When Positivism Hit Poetry

When positivism hit poetry

The moon, that plain silver spoon

became a lump of cosmic rock

Birds flapped ornithologically

The mice of metaphor,

tricks in fashionable runs

and shopping lists became sexy.

charged into the shadows

the usual wars over biscuits and piques.

the sun set, the sun rose, shining

The 19th Hole is not a great place for poetry

because alpha beta omega eggplants

Peter LACH-NEWINSKY, unfurl /2 6

enough for me or the poetic experience

the dancing blue poles of the sublime

in my Che shirt, a girl or even

on Elizabeth Street because the dimples

The Epistemology of Sunrise

I’m not sure,

Is that bird singing,

The sky seems

Peter LACH-NEWINSKY, unfurl /2 7

the sky seems

sonnet for ern elmbury in a dark mirror