Monday, May 30, 2005

being monday

52 mondays in a year approx. Times 60 is 3120 plus 20 for this year makes 3140 my moonday tally. First day of the working week for the working your monday in the old days when weeks ended. Day 1 in flexitime cycles of 24/7’s now is whatever. Default day, D day, delete these septic memes from mind brain! Cant be done, not on any day: Yanqui colonised my consciousness. Yanqui gone home in my head. We are Configured, Walmartyred. No exit from the monster market, bloggsters.
Many mondays ago into the mouth of a Restoration rake, Sir Charles Sedley no less, I put the words:

- Ye godly calculating apes, a fig for your Market! I can’t get no satisfaction in’t, I piss ‘pon’t, a turd i’ th’ teeth o’ the baboon of Profit! I shall show you a map o’ the Market - ( Sir Charles moons).

Which remains my position, the argumentum ex culo, obscene, impotent, kickable, due for reconstruction. To wit:

Luchre filthy, no way, pure fiction, transcendental
based on understandings, promises, wings and prayers,
the medium, the Paraclete of a Capital trinity.

In a global brotherhood of business my word is my bond.
Bond the word is alive and well in Cottesloe,
one of a suited myriad, Logos and Sons P/L

Our all-fathering market is pure intelligence,
artificial, jittery, self-correcting, we believe
quia impossibile est
subject to panic, grounded in irrationality
a mystery unmentionable
as the incommensurabilty of the square root of 2
the Pythagoreans hushed up with extreme prejudice

Economics blown out to metaphysics cum theology
so Dives may divine the fundament of fundaments
and turn a blind eye to the bleeding obvious

J-curve me to heaven Invisible Hand

So I better sharpen my ideas up- this is no way to win the admiration of the senior editor, Black Inc, Level 5, 289 Flinders Lane 3000, nor that of Les Murray who the judicious anthologer of the beat Aust Poetry 2005.

Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song

Ed Spenser claims descent in the Prothalamion from the Spencers of Althorpe. This means, gentle bloggsters, he may be an ancestor of Lady Di.
The other thing is Ez & Tom hiking around the Catharist sites Montsegur etc in the 20s following the same heretical scent as Bestseller Brown.

Friday, May 27, 2005

abbatoir

Thank you dear bloggees for the comments especially my bloodbloggee on level 10, quicktagged Fnn.
Well children today I set off for the abbatoir with our dog Gracie to get the eye of an ox for our Billie who is doing Psych and her psych tutor Kim who has just had a baby axed her to bring next time (all the way to Mt Waverley!) to help her explain sensation or maybe it was perception. Now can I remember the name of the Abbatoir, for the life of me? Found it in the Yellow Pages so I can again, Gathercoles that’s right, out Carrum way borderline Patterson Lakes wetlands woopwoop, 25 kliks from the blogsite. We got there alright, light rain making the scape Dutch to the overeducated eye. Huge bloody place, hangers and hangers of it at the end of a deadend road, Learmonth Rd that got me thinking Russian. Lermontov. Mentioned in John Manifold’s poem The Tomb of John Learmonth A.I.F. (James Hogg & Lermontov were of his kin) A bigtime pan-Slavic Romantic, unhappy as, pulled the plug on himself I think. Or cd have been a duel. Anyway pulled up outside the Boning Room Manager’s door and asked for Andrew. Wrong door. It’s raining. Seems to activate the blood and fear pheromene-smellicules in the air. No sound of slaughter. Make contact. The smell is in the small containershaped office, so’s a young bloke who cd be the teenager Andrew fathered as a teenager, so why’s he not at school? Andrew asks if one eye’s enough so I say 2 wd be good and can I use yr gents which turns out to be the last on the left, off the Lunch Room which has angry sign on the wall:
“The throwing of any item will result in INSTANT DISMISSAL.” Approaching the urinal I notice a small gobbet of flesh on the concrete step. A telltale sign cd this be of meatfights at lunchtime? Killing and boning from 6am cd have that effect on you. I notice my fingers are weirdly yellowstained as by turmeric howcome I dont know. Andrew comes back with the eyeballs in my Tupperware box. Must be fresh out of the sockets, feels warm. Still are when I get home and have a look at them. The feeling of complicity, tremor of guilt and repulsion returns as I write. Bull’s eyes, wide-irised in death with an abstract, glaucous beauty. Perfect for palming as Gloucester’s plucked out in a non naturalistic, Grand Guignol sort of production or as a teaching aid. I wonder about trimming the scraggy bits of fat and regret the lack of optic nerve attachments then put them in the fridge. They’re not needed till next Wednesday, should I put them in the freezer?
Advise me dear bloggees.

Monday, May 23, 2005

gpv

give us this day our daily blog, the word made hypertext dwells amongst us, logolalia, forgive us our lapses, nay absence of sequential thought, for we are a stranger to logic & Rimbaud & Lautreamont are bad for us, for George Herbert & Herbert Amen.
John Bell whom the Brothers booted up very efficaciously has been boiling up Shakespeare & Melville for their essential oils. Henry 6 is 15 acts reduced to 3 on Power & Authority, the accession, over dead bodies, of thuggery after the breakdown of legitimacy.
The set by Stephen Curtis is dead ringer for a quadrant of ye old Nimrod theatre with vomitorium exit. The action is mainly in a meeting when it isnt at war. The world was filled with words, as it is. 50 odd characters for 16 peformers, my receiver was intermittently defective overwhelmed by rabbiting English counties, duchies, earldoms, old real estate in modern dress. The French were faggots in sneakers, shades, blue wigs. Joan of Arc jumped out of a Chines martial arts movie, very sassy & ended up in a shopping trolley, call it the Kosky influence. The fights were danced to the chants of soccer hooligans & riot police, call it the Berkov influence. Warwick in a white suit & Cockney accent. Know wot I mean? The Commons in black farce revolt gave great pleasure. Demos, the lethal dummy armed with a golf club. The Jack Cade sequences were a cut above:
“First kill all the lawyers”
There were many in the audience inc that death’s head the impeachable Fed. Attorney General. Wars of the Roses grows in my mind as an enquiry into leadership. The good king is weak. He avoids decisions, conflict but asserts, embodies, spiritual values He is murdered by “mishapen Dick” The worst prevails.

Sunday, May 22, 2005

gpv identity crisis

dear blog who are we & what do we stand for? The power of the question mark? Ruin to the swindling classes? Cyber-Confusion to the Market, e-coli on Homo Economicus? Anarcho-Quietism? Catastrophism? The Fellowship of the Whimsical, Cosmic Jismatics? The Murray Cod? Are we more a confessional box than a soapbox? Heartbleeding in cyberspace? Let us Garden with Voltaire, ponce with Blaise Pascal? Snafuism? Mateshit? Witha Straya?
Dunno. A Credo is in order, a constitution for a sovereign blog
Article One : the country’s fucked
Two: up yrs for the rent Mammon

Saturday, May 21, 2005

gpv

Lulu half wakes with pins & needles in her right hand. Lulu slips it between her thighs & feels the bloodtide flow back & something very like the kiss of a sea urchin: her own lips opening to her own importunate little pinky.
Lulu sighs & settles to seduce herself, silkily on blue satin sheets. That pinky is a warm gun. midget love gangster…
But enough, there may be children on site… a simple blogger infected by the digital ocean of porn, via the digits, aaaargh, am I a virus, is the soul a gland? No more I must put on my firstnight weeds & away to the War of the Roses, Bell adapts Bard & I shall bear witness, be a martyr to the grand enterprise when next I address the ether.

Friday, May 20, 2005

grand pop vox (cont)

Il Cunto de li Cunti a grand title for a renaissance collection of racy fairy stories, a framing story, tales hanging thereby. Comme La Ronde, 1001 Nights, Canterbury Tales, a reference from Marina Warner, that comehithering don in From Beast to Blonde, good to curl up with yon don, spiritual daughter of Angela Carter, spinning connections between Mother Goose, the Sybil and the Queen of Sheba who was black but comely so Solomon saith in his Song sexopolitically nono but stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love but never sick of flagons which are raisin cakes in the Bible, the pervading misogyny of which I briefly discussed with the sweet brown–eyed Jehovah’s Witness, referring to the Book of Timothy, my name sake, Paul’s man, nay, son speaking mystogogically I presume.

Yes, yesterday outside The Oxford Scholar I ate a steak sandwich in the sun, the unrelenting winter sun & shared a jug o beer with Corro who shouted, crouched sere, benign & bemused with a word to this blond passing artist, a nod to this bald passing student, opposite the de Chiricosed, featureful facade of RMIT for which he is responsible.

Corro: I live in fear of something falling off it.

We canvassed the resilience & disappointments of the syndrome known as life, the case of L. Smith, legless in Pt Melbourne, in particular, the achieve of & souring of the season of Ezra Pound @ La Mama (cf Alison Croggan, theatrenotes.blogspot) & readers will be relieved to know I rose to the 13th floor of 15 Collins St in good Time & Order to consult with the theatre loving Dermatologist who found 4 solar keratoses on my face & crown & rid me of them with squirts of liquid nitrogen. Suspicion of a mole on my inside left thigh lingers, he did not pore into my pores adequately, nags a vox in my head that keeps rehearsing a phonecall to the Dermatologist’s secretary trying to speak with him, to meet for coffee (my shout) in the Paris end of Collins St, somewhere quiet where I could roll up my trouserleg for a doublecheck, his own second opinion. Doubt may be the engine of the scientific method but it will be the death of me, along with Forgetfulness bugbear of the Jacobeans & a few other things.
Tomorrow: a pornographical pickmeup

Thursday, May 19, 2005

grand pop vox

My son Finn gave me a blog for my 61st birthday. A potent present: Here dad, start a conversation with the world. Write & publish & connect. Doggone it! Why has the cat got my tongue?
Got a virtual soapbox grand poppa, git up & rant. World wide extension of vox & plenty of nuttin in the brain box.
Blogfright!
Loosen yr talktapes man. Kick off with few thankees. With my fingers. Must get into the touch typing. Stop talking to yrself.
Thanks Finn. Normous Ill get into the swing of it. So many Qs. What are quicktags, wot are pings, customfields? Who are all these nerds I dont know I find when I press Links. How do I build up the network of conversers are you receiving me…?
Thanks Laura bd wishes & Don Camillo illumination. Ever read the books of Don Marquis: Archie & Mehitabel, a cockroach & a cat? Might humour you. Youre right about preserving ones mirth. Got to stop that ol’ 32ft per sec per sec going down
Thankee Shannish for the memory resurrecting freeverse - but will you look @ the time? 1153. Time to catch the train & lunch with Corrigan & keep my appt with The Dermatologist…

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

melancholia


melencolia, Albrecht Durer

Black Dog Institute essay comp: the origins of the black dog.

Churchill, Johnson and Boswell, the famous trio whistled up by the metaphor of the black dog, have much in common, characteristics that go some of the way towards explaining their affliction. Dead, white pommy males, all of them are literary gents – lest we forget Winnie, astonishingly, won the Nobel prize for literature – and depression is part of the wages of creation. To a man they were overweight over-achievers who drank to excess, smoked and suffered from various dropsies and poxes and gouts. It would seem none of then much liked dogs. Sam was passionate about cats, particularly his beloved Hodge whom he immortalised. Winnie warmed to pigs, observing that “cats look down on us, dogs look up to us, pigs are our equals”. Jimmy was a gourmand who would probably have eaten any beasty with the right sauce. No doubt all of them were familiar with the homeopathic remedy of the hair of the dog, of whatever colour, that could enable them to jumpstart the long day’s statecraft and/or letters through which they tried to prove themselves to the mother by whom they were neglected.

That any of them might have coined this metaphorical slander on dogs is less likely. Nor that Goethe, Byron, Stevenson, Scott, Abe Lincoln, Jesse Winchester, Tipper Gore, or whoever else you can googlefluke, did. The phrase has been in the air, part of the cultural exchequer, for millennia. There was a black dog in the Roman poetical lexicon of Horace and it could be chased back to ancient Egypt where jackal-headed Anubis was a god of the underworld, patron of embalmers and poisoners. However the Anubis website presents him as a friendly guide, something of a blue heeler rounding up the dead. The mutt of the metaphor is more the one Webster refers to in the Jacobean play The White Devil (1612):

Keep the dog far hence that’s foe to men
Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again.

Descended from European myths and traditions of the supernatural and diabolical, a black dog was the form a witch’s familiar or the devil’s agent used to take. In Goethe’s Faust he appears as a poodle - as he should in a tragicomedy. One with two heads stood guard at the gates of hell. He is a creature, or the accomplice, of the Adversary, a figure of Negation, an immanence of Evil, darkness visible on four legs and wagging a tail running through Christian and pre-Christian imagination.

In modern, secular times the dog has got lost and shrunk into a psychological cliché. One online shrink proffers an emblem of the inner conflict at the core of our being by replacing good and evil angels with two dogs fighting, one black and one white. The dog that wins is the dog that is fed the most – so starve out the black dog of negativity and give that good white dog a bone. Once potent metaphors turn to bromide and give the suffering mind no succour. A suffering mind might do better applying to a poet than a doctor. To Baudelaire for example, who said he had a cat in his head and was the better for it. Imagining and eye-balling this seraphic cat, from which came a deep soothing vibration, was to him a means of steadying his judgment, a source of inspiration. He found this a better remedy than hashish or absinthe, and it has got to be more effective than an internalised dogfight.

There is, in any case, no black dog lurking in the language for a depressed Frenchman to use to embody his condition. The frogs suffer from le cafard, the cockroach. A search of the languages of the world would procure a metaphorical zoo. Hunting the snark of its provenance in English has a curiosity value. It leads one to consider the function of such a figure of speech. Since Adam and the cave wall painters, the human acts of naming and image-making have arisen from the desire to know and control. Painting the savage auroch in Lascaux was, through sympathetic magic, trying to tame it, to own it. Naming the vague but overwhelming symptoms of depression “black dog” is trying to do something similar and this personification gives us more solace than translating them into Latin or Greek. Because it is a metaphor, a Greek word meaning something that “carries over”. One thing is expressed in terms of another. Depression itself is a metaphor as used not only in psychology, but also in economics, meteorology and astronomy. The nature and power of metaphor is transformative. As a rhetorical device, it has the potential to present a new way of seeing and refresh the understanding.

The mind has mountains, cliffs of fall,
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.

The black dog is a rundown metaphor, not of this order of suggestiveness. Still it has the effect of separating Winnie’s good self from a condition that comes and goes. It might assert a superiority, as a man is superior to a dog, friend or foe. If Tipper says she has the black dog on her back, the nightmare image, conjuring the incubus of demonology, implies the malady is not intrinsic, not her responsibility and holds out the possibility that if the right measures were taken, it can be put down. The notion of possession, if it does not relieve, excuses and simplifies the state she is in. Further behind the consolatory euphemism, if it is merely that, drifts a binary conception of the suffering mind: well/not well. Take the medication, switch off serotonin re-uptake result: happiness. The dog has become a chemical dog. General practice deals with it by means of drugs with names dreamt up by corporate namers, strange names wrought from the roots of dead languages. It can be shaken off with, say, Ancanero and with ancillary cognitive therapy retraining bad, habitual black doggy responses, one can live happier and dry-mouthed, ever after.
The black dog does not sit comfortably with an holistic approach to the problem for which it is a metaphor. It does not carry any suggestion across of depression as a bio/psycho/social/genetic complex As far as treatment is concerned, it might have us barking up the wrong tree.

For William Shakespeare and Albrecht Durer, the metaphor for depression was melancholia, that is black bile which, along with yellow bile, blood and phlegm, was one of four “humours” mixed in any human, corresponding to the four elements of nature and much else. Perfect equilibrium between humours is impossible in our sublunary world, the resultant would be characterless, a psychological blank. Who we are, or our “complexion”, depends on our singular disequilibria between the four main types – melancholic, choleric, sanguine and phlegmatic. Working within Galen’s paradigm (which survived until about the time of the American Civil War) without benefit of a cellular pathology, Shakespeare and Durer reveal more about the nature of melancholy than a wilderness of psychiatrists.

Hamlet has lost all his mirth, wherefore he knows not, though an audience can see a causal connection between the way he feels and a world that is “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours”. Hamlet is also an unstoppable wit, quick to put on an antic disposition. He is paralysed by depression but he is the hero, the bi-polar hero, literary ancestor of the original Batman, another mourning, reclusive avenger. Shakespeare persuades us that Hamlet wouldn’t be the hero he is without his down cast of mind. The blues is part of the black prince’s genius and it might be argued, the bard’s own.

Albrecht Durer’s engraving Melencolia 1 (1514) is a riddling compendium of the hermetic tradition known to Shakespeare as The School of Night(that Frances Yates expounds in her book The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age). It prefigures the dejected/inspired genius of 19th century Romanticism. Durer has scratched out with a beauty at once sombre and luminous a meditation upon the doubleness of melancholy. Under the depressing thrall of electronic media, in these days of soundbite spin and one-dimensional hype, Durer’s engraving feeds the mind wonderfully.

Look at the picture.

A black and white picture, graven with a burin when Durer was subject to profound melencolia, as he spells it here.
There is a black and white dog. The dog and every other element of the picture will sustain a positive and a negative interpretation. They all seek to rouse inert observing minds to enquiry. There is a sturdy angel with flaxen locks crowned with a laurel wreath, or some say parsley. Her gaze is piercing, fixed and upwards. Is this a state of anomie or visionary trance? Holding a poker-sized calliper in her satiny lap, she sits surrounded by a litter of discarded tools and objects referring profusely to mysteries kabbalistic, neo-platonic, Pythagorean, Gnostic, you gname it. We are looking at a gothic Rubik’s cube.
A snaky dog-faced bat flies in the beams of Saturn, the black sun of melancholy. The black and white dog lies still at the feet of the angel. The dog seems in a bad way with its ribs sticking out, shining through its hide and its limbs locked as if in a cramp or fit. One authority has pronounced it hydrophobic. Dame Frances Yates begs to differ: the dog represents the body in perfect control and the limbs are neatly tucked under it as dogs do. The dog is ambiguous. Let us leave the dog there, poised between opposites, spelling itself backwards. The dog is not a problem. The mystic polyhedron next to it and the magic square on the wall are also chocka with potential intellectual activity, but let them be as well.
Considered as an allegory of Durer’s own psychological condition,
the heart of the problem is stasis, is being stuck. The dogbat shrieks, the sand falls in the glass and the angel does nothing. While, smack dab in the centre of the composition, another aspect of melencolia is busily at work. Above the dog on a disused millstone, next to a ladder no one is climbing, under scales empty but in balance, there is a chubby cupid. Eros. Desire. Hard to see what Desire is doing in a reproduction this size and quality but he is concentrating as only children can. Is he forming his first letters on his slate, or is that an engraver’s burin in his hand? ‘Tis. In Durer’s psychograph Eros the engraver counterpoints the disabled angel, the little cherub absorbed by his craft that, out of black, can make sensible light.

As blackdog-loving Sam Beckett put it: Imagination dead. Imagine.

Cabaret Wort

PETER MATHERS MATTERS

a show in an art space, Bridget MacDonnell’s, Mark Laidlers Collingwood Gallery, or somewhere: the Makings of the Blessed Matters del Pelaco

a gathering of ikons

objets lost and found polaroid collagens

illuminated tram tickets
officeworks decoupage

PLUS

Postcards from Pelaco, a Web of Correspondences integrated and rendered

AND

a demonstration of how to convert the Hill’s Hoist into a Prayer Wheel

WHAT’S MORE

extractions from the Corpus Mathersensis, funny bits and scenes from the novels and plays

INCLUDING

materia secreta, never before made public from the Mathers Papers,
revelations of the approximate length of a piece of string.

PERFORMED AS

The Wart Cabaret with Jack Trap and the Wallopers singing “Mine Tink1t It Fits!”

ALSO FEATURING

contributions, in various media, from kindred spirits and the Illuminati of of Mons Pelaco.

fox the film

FOX

a synopsis for a comic film

(freely adapted from Ben Jonson’s Volpone)

Summer in Dundee, capital of the state of Waa Waa, where it is always the ‘80s.

An icon of the city is RENNIE FOX, the disgraced corporate cow- cum play-boy now supposed at death’s door. FoCorp is in the hands of the receivers but Fox still manages to do business from his bedside. Unmarried with no kids, billions worth of offshore assets, bulk property in other names he has a famously unwritten will. Competing prospective inheritors are queuing up to his riverside palazzo.

Corpselike, Fox thrives on the ingratiating tributes presented to him via OZZIE ‘the MOZ’ MOZART, king of conmen. Also helping him keep his end up are NANNA, a female dwarf accountant, BENDI, a black trannie personal trainer and CAZZA, an ex-Vatican counter-tenor and killer cook. The Moz privately assures each well-wishing gold-digger he/she is the heir apparent, especially FARQUAR, a rapacious, geriatric businessman.

Fox has the hots for RED, Farquar’s wife. Disguised as a New Age aromatherapist, he attempts to seduce her but is beaten off by SECURITY. The Moz is dispatched to urge Farquar that a final, brief remission could be secured for his employer through the biblical therapy of a juicy young woman. If Farquar supplies his wife for the purpose, his name is on the will. Farquar supplies.

Meanwhile, SIR PEREGRINE POLL, the English psephologist and conspiracy theorist flies into Dundee at the invitation of DOW DIDDLY, the Premier. His good lady DOLLY turns up at the party the Moz throws to facilitate the therapeutic rape. Mistaking a secret chamber for the lady’s room, Dolly springs Fox plying Red with hashish and goat weed. The Moz disengages her with a false report of her husband taken off to the island of Quokkadu to dally with a lap dancer.

Red’s ravishing is terminally interrupted by BON CROWE, a good young man, who falls in good old-fashioned love at first sight of her en deshabille. Bon does not know he has been disinherited by his senile father MAL the media magnate, in favour of Fox. The Moz calls the COPS who arrest the victim and her rescuer.

The media are full of the scandal: Bon, the born again footballer, Red, the charity queen and anti-drug campaigner charged with attempt murder in lurid circumstances. The Moz with the aid of JELLBELLY QC, stitch up a case that Bon, abetted by Red, had attempted to murder the dying Fox.

On Quokkadu Sir Peregrine is sniffing out conspiracy and business opportunity. He meets up with BUCK PACKER, a stoned and lonely planeteer. Sir P. claims he is in a

position to sell part of the Pilbara to the Indons. He offers Buck a piece of the action. Dolly waltzes in mistaking Buck for a cross-dressed lap dancer. He is actually an ASIO operative and busts Sir P, who makes his escape disguised as a turtle. Unhappily he is caught by Nanna, Bendi and Cazza and served as a soup to an appreciative Fox.

The case comes to court. Bon’s father and Red’s husband appear as witnesses for the prosecution to curry favour with Fox.

Fox is wheeled in: the alleged rape is clearly an impossibility. The jury convicts.

Fox is jubilant and drinking to excess. Addicted to swindling, he wants more, more, more. To crank up the schadenfreude and dash the hopes of the expectant inheritors to the max, the Moz persuades Fox to make him the sole beneficiary and then let out that he, Fox, is dead.

The hopefuls, Farquar, Mal Crowe, and Jellbelly QC, rock up to hear the will. Fox and the Moz aredisguised as members of the Fraud Squad. The will is read: Aspirants get nothing. The Moz gets all. He now out-foxes the Fox. As the new master of the house he has his “dead” employer and his indecent trio of carers thrown into the street.

Red and Bon are back in court for sentencing. Fuming at himself for losing control of the game, Fox turns up in his Fraud Squad persona. He discreetly lets Jellbelly know he is still alive and that the lawyer is still the heir He instructs Jellbelly to uncover the framing of the innocents.

The Moz is brought to court. Before giving evidence against him, Fox makes him an offer to go shares in the estate and back into partnership. Together they can beat the world, no one can do it like them, world best practice, scammers supreme etc. But the Moz is happy with his lot and denounces Fox as a loony impersonating a Fraud Squad officer.

Fox leaps on the bench, strips off his uniform and reveals all. The virtuous Bon and Red are released. Fox and the Moz are taken in custody. Together again their eyes grow moist with mutual admiration. Lawyers gather like ravens. Fox winks at the judge and the judge winks back.

© Tim Robertson 2003.

Friday, May 06, 2005

Welcome to the world of James Timothy Robertson!

I would just like to wish my dad, J T Robertson, a happy 61st and hope you like your present!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!

Birthday poem for Tim

You must remember this: a kiss is just a kiss. Thirty-six years, however, is significant. This is your birthday pome:

Dreamimg of Yesterday

A full moon over Boho,
A staircase of descending stones,
Numberless bone-cosy fire-warmed nights
And frangipani-fragrant dawns,
Nightly feasts of living flavours,
A deck beneath our feet,
We float above the distant mopoke,
A sea of frozen stars over our heads,
Before we sleep,
Warm spoons curled in intimate hollows.

Do you remember the red glow of burning ash
As the tottering willow flares and sparks?
The silent fall of spare snowflakes on young brussel sprouts
And the taste of our own raspberries, warm on the vine?
Can you still see the garden caught in a rushing tide,
The grass lying afterwards, breathless with vanished floodwater,
Or cool under the giant plum,
While the cicadas strip the hot yellow air of oxygen?

I remember a naked man, flailing the weeds from the dam’s edge,
Ploughing the patchwork of currents across his field of muddy water,
Slipping the narrow roots of tiny trees into the earth,
Conjuring a grove, a vineyard or an orchard with his hands,
Back bared in the fierce sun,
Playing with fire,
Our man on the land.

It’s just a place,
A shabby hut in a rock strewn, dry and weedy gully,
Where we laughed and quarreled and dreamed
And our music filled the air,

I remember you at the station,
And you were always
Coming home

Happy 61 Jates!
Love,
Shannish