Counterpart

And sometimes I like to smoke in bed with the lights on and make an island out of pillows. Only one, so the air isn’t too stale by the time you come over. In the Parisian boarding house, he would knock on her door at 10 a.m. every day, or 6 p.m., depending on the saint’s name, saying, Can I smoke at your window? When he left finally for New England, a semester-long course on Ulysses and marijuana with the girl who worked in the archives, she gave his books back, too sick to offer anything else. She thinks they hugged but can’t remember that time very clearly.

Today I: read a book – Crooked House by Agatha Christie – in three hours in the swollen leather rocking chair outside. It’s got this incredibly self-effacing narrator who does nothing except sleuth around cisterns and take long walks with his lady-friend (the murdered man’s granddaughter). I can’t even describe him, civil service, thirty-five, presumably clean-shaven and wearing a pinstriped suit and too-short laces. Nothing else. I like the repetitions in her books, the emphasis on interiors – clues in portraits, upset handbags, obsolete poisons. In this one, the man’s injected with eye drops instead of insulin. Approximately two or three months after reading one of her books, it’s possible to condense the entire 170 pages into a few phrases – I call them Agathas – of the remaining symbols/images. The Moving Finger – invalid – tweed skirts – inbred small-town interference. And so on.

And turning a particular corner on a particular street, the sun drowning in itself, I got an acute sense of Australia, like there was someone holding an invisible placard in front of me that said, This is your biannual clarity about dusty asphalty suburbia except there wasn’t such a person there. I know this because they would have been run over, and I didn’t hear a scream.

kitchen table talk

check it:

http://lambpoon.wordpress.com/

privacy in public places

Please don’t point that thing at me / Your eyes are widening behind it

But remember when you’re wandering alongside / The river has a right side and a wrong side

Oh! The humidity! / Oh! The stupidity!

My friends live in renovators’ dreams / It’s as euphemistic as it seems

It’s funny the things that stay with you / Her jewellery on the table and the smell of her perfume

So I’ll steal another kiss / Before the sun goes down on this fibrotown

Goodbye, Lucksmiths. Goodbye, photos casted with winter light.

Post-script-ed

I’m on twitter!

http://twitter.com/ainsleethistle

Winter ending, & other sentimental problems.

1. Post-rain hair.

2. Ex-asylum near Beechworth. The winding fire escapes and pallor give it away.

3. High enough to feel the cold; Beechworth. There was also a tree with a face in it, that I didn’t take a photograph of, because I don’t know why exactly, the position was wrong.

4. They cling to the branches like dreams of horses.

5. This reminds me of chimneys and nuclear clouds and paused sword fights while you finger and then roll over your dead, and being unable to cut straight.

6. Don’t swim there, you’ll get dashed against the rocks and tear the ligaments in your knee. (Summary-in-chief of one of those Enid Blyton boarding school books).

7. This is too much like a certain house in Antichrist to be idyllic/pastoral anymore. Or maybe there never was a beneficent landscape; maybe all trees have after-birth in the form of sap exuding from them.

8. Heartbeat.

9. Scrofula-yellow.

10. Pens don’t really weigh that much.

11. Somewhere on the road to Bright; there was a friendlier sheep closer to the fence, but I preferred these oblivious ones.

The Amazing Fire Escape

that fell down during the fire and killed the people standing on it, in their white nightdresses and striped pyjamas and cotton bunting, that I saw a picture of once in a photojournalism book. Do fire stations still have poles to slide down (quicker than stairs, pole-escapes)?

Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded: “I detest the East. The whole fucking mass of it: the highways, the suburbs, the hills, the rich cunts, the smacked-out bored cunts. The whitest part of my city, where you’ll see the authentic white Australian, is in the eastern suburbs. A backdrop of Seven Elevens, shopping malls, gigantic parking lots… In the East, in the new world of suburbia there is no dialogue, no conversation, no places to go out: for there is no need, there is television”.

It’s not the only page I folded over in this book, but it’s the one I turned to today, thinking, the tiles on my roof will fall off in this storm and then the weatherboards will split and then the plaster will cake and the mortar drip like birthday candles, and where else would I go except back to the East? So it’s not the most logical conclusion, but I’m trying to reconnect my head to my body and the muscles are proving difficult to retie. Last night in keywords: passionfruit punch, berry punch, wine, lipstick misapplication, wine, wine, gin, wine, collapse, sleep.

I have a weird relationship with the East made out of black/white splits and intentional delusions. Structural hatred – for the lack of public transport, the homogeneity, the villages of identical houses with identical red roofs – and another hatred that’s harder to define, more biased. There’s sickness in the East and it festers in the bedrooms of bored teenagers who have nowhere to go except further and further into their own heads. Sometimes I would walk to a patch of trees a few streets away from my house and curl up next to a big tree and smoke stolen cigarettes and then extinguish them on my skin. I hate how the East provided the perfect background for this: suburbs of closes and courts and boulevards, empty playgrounds in primary colours, street signs bent the wrong way.
But I decided to like it – defensively, hopelessly. Walking in the evening, wan light in the kitchen windows of neighbours, pressing my nose to the wet asphalt, the absence of street lights creating a dark corridor out of over-wide streets. I never saw a ghost in the East, but I felt some slip under fences. I pretended to know people – we all did, I suppose, seeing faces in knotted wood, carrying a plastic-cup telephone system to the bus stop. The landscape seemed benign enough, tolerant, tolerable, and if I couldn’t see the beautiful details, then that was my fault.

Sex is everywhere and nowhere. Schoolgirls roll their skirts over at the top to expose thighs. Giant sex shops, open later than anything else, skulk along intersections, as sterile and fluorescent and painless as they come. I fuckin’ loved you – the sadness of interchangeable couples on mid-afternoon trains with interchangeable prams and interchangeable irresolvable disappointments. Wool jumpers stink when it rains, and classrooms fill with a smell that’s almost meaty. Boys fuck girls fuck girls fuck boys and the awkwardness, the clumsiness, the difficult condoms, the shyness, the post-coital delayed longing is better, so much better, than the perfect coupling they want.

Later, you’ll run away from her and blow your savings on a plane trip to Germany. The whole way there, you’ll clutch your stomach with white fingers, watching the effortless blue sky become effortless cloud, and the man next to you will turn to you and say something about immensity.

But you still haven’t lost her.

– The brontosaurus could not have held its head in the air in the way portrayed in zoo manuals and old palaeontology texts; its heart was too weak to pump blood all the way to a vertical head. It would have dragged its long neck along the ground like a snake.

broken paddle yuletide fish

i love him

Sapin, Supine.

I have started photographing with film more. Because, oh, I like seeing something through a little silver hole and then not seeing the results for weeks or months or whenever I find film cannisters in the colourful mess that is my bedroom and bother to develop them. I forgot that I took a camera to Clunes (a little country town in Central Victoria near Ballarat — I went up there to help out at a bookfair. It’s lovely, wide streets, a narrow river with whistling leaves and an alive fountain). And it seemed Clunes caught Winter before Melbourne — we braced ourselves with whiskey and rum cake in the morning, and traipsed in boots and scarves. Most of the time I forget to take a camera with me and then look up at the grey/blue sky and the funny yellow light that falls before it rains and get grumpy and record images in my head to come back to later. But as if the world will repeat itself just for a hunk of plastic and a girl with a particular idea in her head of how things should look.

More photographs: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=27518&id=1068096512&l=fa4ba8d8ff

Not as queer as when you finish painting that pink.

Floods kill hundreds in East; complete film now showing. Your razors collect at the bottom of the shower and I step on them in the morning. This is one way to end a relationship: others include standing at the kitchen window and pretending your backyard is Kansas, or confusing your wardrobe with a womb. Sometimes I walk through puddles without gumboots, and then I come home and tell you: wearing electric blue is sad and you should not.

There’s no five o’clock in winter – the clock jumps straight from four to six. More and more people are not found in their deckchairs until the morning, and by then it is too late for the newspaper headlines. Sadness of table legs that taper into stained tiles. Sadness of electricity cords, plugged in, that you cannot remember what they came for. Sadness of dropping half a board game down a drain on Lygon Street. Sadness of an empty attic. Sadness of naked paper dolls.

The gardener comes in through the garden gate wearing an overcoat and a shovel, his nose on the closed roses, and sees nothing, or says nothing, or wears nothing. He is, after all, accustomed to dirty fingernails. He is used to lost gloves. He is wearing overalls, black spectacles, and a gas mask. It is raining sirens. The sky is blue, like morning coal, and he follows the path through the garden, heading towards the locked shed. He is wearing a blackboard instead of a head, and insects trace white tracts on his face – these are your lips. Your chin needs wiping.

There is a piñata in the shape of a death star growing on my kitchen table. It began with medicinal brandy and ended in not being able to stand the clarity, the stark bleached simple fucking whiteness of a night without wine. It ended, as it always does, in threading hazard tape through bushes and fences; it ended in three-dollar haircuts and a midnight steak, and last time I looked, you don’t even eat meat. I guess you just left it on the windowsill, may-as-well cherry pie. And that was the saddest thing, how she knew no one would think twice about it. How she wiped her hands and walked away.

Because sometimes I just can’t stand it, you know? I am sixteen and I keep a revolver on my pillow for when I think of kissing you. I am twenty and I hide under the trestle table under the clothesline and watch the caterpillars eat the broccoli leaves and wipe the back of my hand over my mouth and look away from birds with broken legs and want the letter you said you had in my dreams. Except it was not a dream, and I am afraid to ask. Except the world is flat, and you have no telephone reception on your ship.

“From our window you can see their patchy, illusory outlines, grunged onto his yellow thick curtains. but i would prefer you did not. there is a woman: she trundles down the street, salting her lips with the seine, rumors of the sea shrunk to the size of a postage stamp. she will be gone hours by the time you look at the black flanking her again. so drain it all into your mind. the butcher, white as his apron, staring. when they drop their arms, not butcher any longer, and their eyes redden, rougissent. in their chests the sagacity that comes from sinking so long in own skin; surface quiverings and droplets with measured frequency. at intervals of conversation, humour, wit. the exterior world is as far away as birth, but they don’t know how to look at their insides, either. i have wasted my eyes and the flickering light of this room on them. the curtains gaped, and are shut, now, by your arms, hungrily stony and turned on us instead.”