Jake Goetz
Jake Goetz currently lives in Sydney's Inner West. His poems have more recently appeared in Rabbit, past simple (US), Several Hundred Fools, Cordite, Southerly and Plumwood Mountain. His first book, meditations with passing water, a long-form poem written about / with / alongside the Brisbane River, is forthcoming as a part of the Rabbit Poets Series in November, 2018.
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Personal locating
it’s about 10am in Pig City
hot lemon water in the yard
a crow cries and i look up for a plane
but only see the blue roaring
furiously the Aloe Vera’s
grown heaps it protrudes
like a collection of hands
grabbing for cheap Nutella
in France when 950 gram jars
were reduced from 4.50 euros
to 1.41 but this happened
some months ago (in Paris?)
i read it skimming through
the ABC News and yesterday
Amber posted an article on
the US government lifting a ban
on hunting grizzlies in Yellowstone
apparently the population is
nearing 700 after almost nearing
extinction Wyoming has agreed
to hunt 22 bears Idaho 1
which begs a few questions
but i watched a video the other day
a man was saying how all the potatoes
in Idaho are sprayed so intensely
with pesticides that the farmers
have to store the harvest
in giant warehouses for 2 weeks
before the potatoes are safe
to handle i also recall a comedian
explaining that we’ve lost
our ability to be humorous
by relying on technology to tell our jokes
this poem is somewhere between a petition
and those short marketing videos
you see on your newsfeed
cute fast and steadfast distraction
or liberator of information?
a grizzly will kill you if it has the chance
if it cares to
Morning’s catch
               ‘Each tree is introspection’
                              —Ted Berrigan, LVII (The Sonnets)
               amidst the Brazilian shade
of a suburban jacaranda
               one finds what it means
               to be a branch
anchored to the soil
through time yet forever
                              in search of air
               feeling the dry grass
once the fertile playground
               of mycorrhizal relations
               and looking up
                              between green leaves
sky’s blue considered as
               an inland river system
                              carrying the poem
               as the one environment
               i can feel Indigenous to
where in the Bolivian
               interpretation of my dream
it’s as if Pachamama
had offered herself in her sleep
               waking only so often
               to check on her kids
distributing pamphlets and
               collecting donations
in the form of bushfires and floods
                              ‘a syntax’ she sighs
               ‘of crunching leaves
               caught between a truck’s wheels
on an ever-widening highway’
                              the way time is an animal
               that seeks nothing more
                                             than escape
               and how confused by the headlights
                              of our desire
               we seek nothing more
                              than its containing
watching as a spider’s web
               shimmer through
morning’s breath catching the light
               catching it
The sound of a donkey
Lake Titicaca breathes
upon the shore
as if its centre were a lung
sucking oxygen
from Pachamama
then passing it on
to two ducks that waddle beside
three donkeys
and a wooden boat motionless
waiting through days
to be pushed and returned
to nature set free
like a teenage kids
first acid trip
knowing for all this
is all it is
all a light wash of waves
               can make of change
a bottle of Inka Kola
waiting to pass down
through generations
into bisphenol A
the way krill eat
iron rich algae
and whales feast
upon the krill only to release
iron rich excrement
for the algae to again
bloom
*
on the shore
               an old man chewing coca
               lifts his eyes to drink sky’s
surround-sound blue
before allowing them to fall
               like rain into the reeds
laughing at the sound
               of a donkey sniffing at his jeans
then bending over he picks up
               two bottles of petrol
and places them inside
                              the wooden boat
then pushing the bow
he swings it
parallel to the water
then pushing along the stern
wood touches water
and again with the bow
he’s in completely
and must only nudge
from the shallows
               to cut through the reeds
back to the lung
tossing eucalypts with each
gasp beyond
this body of blue water
and what is it to be held by this
as a gull is held by its wings
or the sun like a bee
on the other end
of the wind’s imagining
Jake Goetz currently lives in Sydney's Inner West. His poems have more recently appeared in Rabbit, past simple (US), Several Hundred Fools, Cordite, Southerly and Plumwood Mountain. His first book, meditations with passing water, a long-form poem written about / with / alongside the Brisbane River, is forthcoming as a part of the Rabbit Poets Series in November, 2018.