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Poem

The ABR Podcast 

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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goldsworthy

Episode #184

It might be … P is for Peter, physician, patient, poet

By Michael Shmith

In this week’s ABR Podcast, Michael Shmith reviews a memoir from poet, novelist, librettist, and Adelaide GP Peter Goldsworthy. The book’s title is The Cancer Finishing School. Shmith begins by observing that doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill, before immediately recognising this as the useless delusion of a patient. Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor whose most recent book is Merlyn, a biography of the widow of Sidney Myer. Listen to Michael Shmith’s ‘It might be …: P is for Peter, physician, patient, poet’, published in the April issue of ABR.

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Again, death rolled towards / my daughter and me. Again / its grim, slow prowl and sudden / bulk. Again, human misery / veered from its lane.

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This place we live is termed ‘rural’ / or ‘countryside’ by arrangement / with or of the planters of grains, / the breeders of animals for / slaughter, by conservative vote.

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not quite meandering chi luck / more like vermillion songbirds than orange / figure / maybe nine months postpartum ...

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(A fugue in words inspired by a shipwreck at Vanikoro)

 

They

should have known

the blood-red coral

would look for props –

fallen men, upturned ships

nu ...

As if / the black window / at the solitary pass / from I to this (or you or now) / could let a human mind ...

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Scene like a Banksy mural: / tiny Flower Thrower lobbing / blood and vernix onto our // chests, squirming pink- / purple skin gliding on Māmān, / alien as amniotic fluid,

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we live with myriad trees
brush boxes engulf our balconies
October skins bursting pistachio green

beneath in bark litter
Chinese boys carry lattes
crack basketballs down the middle seam

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