Selected poems
Sixty-five South
1.
Simple trigonometry
brings on a sense of sharp unease.
Best to visit in the summer —
and don’t pass sixty-five degrees.
2.
Arriving at Deception Island,
one has a sense of ancient maps,
Boreas with puffing cheeks,
waterspouts and, yes, perhaps
those early Dutch and Portuguese
undone by Incognita’s spells.
That iceberg in the distance there,
is that a kind of caravel?
3.
Our boat is idling in the bay.
I have a chance for two hours now
to watch the wavelets wear away
an iceberg’s skirts and see just how
fresh water’s eaten by the salt,
tirelessly and with dispassion,
lick by lick by lick by lick
as if there’d never been a ration.
4.
Thar she blows, they would have yelled,
relishing their windswept lives,
readying a fresh harpoon,
getting out the flensing knives.
Now the foredeck’s armed with lenses,
clever iPhones at the ready.
The captain tweaks the engines slightly
as if to keep the pixels steady.
5.
Eighteen hundred sets of eyes
not all of them, these days, acute
scan the stillness of the morning
as if it were an absolute,
persuaded that they soon will see
a roiling turbulence of whales,
not just a sundry fluke or two
vanishing like sudden sails.
6.
The radar speaks of thirteen ships
within a mere three hundred K.
Nevertheless, we wake alone
among the bergs of Charlotte Bay,
their sense of inner concentration
being no doubt part of what
first brought us to these parallels.
Lyric moments? Maybe not.
7.
Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen
achieved that final latitude
but only one of them would bring
the luck, the weather and the food.
8.
When Scott first saw Amundsen’s flag,
it was the start of many blows.
Each night the diary in his tent
was chiselled into perfect prose.
9.
Today we leave Antarctic proper;
we’ve seen the penguins and the whales,
the icebergs in their convolutions
and thought about the Age of Sail
whose heroes nosed around down here
sniffing out a sort of fame.
Or was it just the golden oil
that burned with such a lambent flame?
The Qantas Conversion
Like camels through the eyes of needles
the rich up-front decline to suffer.
The poor are blest — and cannot fly.
I, alone with some three hundred
members of the sinning class,
am pinned between the aisle and window
with fourteen hours to go,
knees up somewhere near my ears.
Pope Francis says that hell exists
but that there may be no one there.
I myself have long pronounced
the place a sad, vindictive myth
but on this flight I’m not so sure.
Eternal life could be like this
middle-row and middle-seat,
pair of pilots spared from death,
cabin crew that fails to age
and avgas that will not run out.
Dear god of endless aeronautics,
I fear I’ve lost my faith in doubt.
Garden Party
A mid-Victorian garden party
straight from Alice in Wonderland;
two thousand humans off a cruise-ship,
three thousand king-size penguins and
the manners that must credit both,
the tall birds in their dinner suits,
the humans in their puffer jackets.
Our penguin hosts refuse the cute,
address us sagely with their nods,
flashing just a smidge of yellow.
Although the Queen is running late
the party proving more than mellow.
Americans, polite as always,
converse in their distinctive drawls;
the penguins talk their three-plus-three;
then add a sort of dying fall.
The wind howls in from the Atlantic
and brings life down to minus ten.
We had to jeep four hours to get here.
I doubt that I’ll be back again.
Geoff Page is based in Canberra and has published 22 collections of poetry, two novels and five verse novels. His recent books include Gods and Uncles and PLEVNA: A Verse Biography.
Main image: (Getty).