John Ernest Tranter Biography

The God of Smoke listens idly in the heat
to the barbecue sausages
speaking the language of rain deceitfully
as their fat dances.

Azure, hazed, the huge drifting sky shelters
its threatening weather.
A screen door slams, and the kids come tumbling
out of their arguments,

and the barrage of shouting begins, concerning
young Sandra and Scott
and the broken badminton racquet and net
and the burning meat.

Is that a fifties home movie, or the real
thing? Heavens, how
a child and a beach ball in natural colour
can break your heart.

And the brown dog worries the khaki grass
to stop it from growing
in place of his worship, the burying bone.
The bone that stinks.

Turn now to the God of this tattered arena
watching over the rites of passage -
marriage, separation; adolescence
and troubled maturity:

having served under that bright sky you may look up
but don't ask too much:
some cold beer, a few old friends in the afternoon,
a Southerly Buster at dusk.
...

Flying up a valley in the Alps where the rock
rushes past like a broken diorama
I'm struck by an acute feeling of precision -
the way the wing-tips flex, just a little
as the German crew adjust the tilt of the sky and
bank us all into a minor course correction
while the turbo-props gulp at the mist
with their old-fashioned thirsty thunder - or
you notice how the hostess, perfecting a smile
as she offers you a dozen drinks, enacts what is
almost a craft: Technical Drawing, for example,
a subject where desire and function, in the hands
of a Dürer, can force a thousand fine ink lines
to bite into the doubts of an epoch, spelling
Humanism. Those ice reefs repeat the motto
whispered by the snow-drifts on the north side
of the woods and model villages: the sun
has a favourite leaning, and the Nordic gloom
is a glow alcohol can fan into a flame.
And what is this truth that holds the grey
shaking metal whole while we believe in it?
The radar keeps its sweeping intermittent promises
speaking metaphysics on the phosphor screen;
our faith is sad and practical, and leads back
to our bodies, to the smile behind the drink
trolley and her white knuckles as the plane drops
a hundred feet. The sun slanting through a porthole
blitzes the ice-blocks in my glass of lemonade
and splinters light across the cabin ceiling.
No, two drinks - one for me, one for Katharina
sleeping somewhere - suddenly the Captain
lifts us up and over the final wall
explaining roads, a town, a distant lake
as a dictionary of shelter - sleeping
elsewhere, under a night sky growing bright with stars.
...

I resigned to tell mother a secret sign,
insolent napkin. But it's natural to commit a crime,
the second dose of germs that make you cross,
and then the moral lapses teach us
with their beaks.

Among the crimes you botched, were you not
floating up to heaven in a frock? ‘Bless you,
bless the solemn symphony of duty.'
Grudging duty, that is, to quickly quell
a pallid polka

or pump up a yelping shiver to a spasm,
the kind that young gentleman only hear about
rattling their rusty skates among the rafters.
I came here young, able and long-shanked
and left limping.

Oh, tell it to the horse marines, that if we were
agreeable, why, we were also - just a little -
ashamed of our pink hissy fits. Thus taught,
‘Shiftless, have done for, knock and enter.'
So, knock it off.

As the slumbrous subject of heaven glares
down on us, do the children aspire to a better
pedagogy? Bless your more sensitive arm.
And I may advertise - forgive me -
a scribbled graph

that would paper over the filthy morass
to which you now offer amorous admission,
lures of tissue-paper, to clog the pale
epochs yawning on the baroque porch,
your careless greed.
...

Jim Gott and old money don't mix. There is
no possibility of change. He sent flowers
to the old lady, to no avail. Then he fought
the Chinese laundry over the disputed crease
...

The kids should visit a history museum
in their senior year, to understand disgrace as
one form of Clinton's victory. On the other hand
the European Community foreign debt gives
...