i dont know why i do this

except for reasons of immediate insanity, locatable sickness:

spatialblues.blogspot.com

committing infanticide on yet another blog.

will let you know details of the next one when they come to me.

a monster without skull or bones to speak of

sequence of badly-shot interior details.  but the roses in the front garden are in bloom. and i have a new poem, part of a series called ‘problems of geometry’.

ii.

to walk through a window is a problem

of geometry where glass slicks

down and skin subtracts from skin,

the redness of your blood older

than spilt milk, anterior to the first

dead possum in the street this year

curved against the gutter’s shell

after electrocution, fur all flied

and hailed on, a plastic cup

in the hands of a nervous child at a birthday party:

and i think this is what you need,

panes shuttering like eggs when

the cuckoo bird comes, knocks

them to the ground and settles in

for a temporary winter, i think

you need to become other things

and fill your cracks with air, spend

whole dreams collecting teeth

like so many ruined acorns.

all the pretty horses

last weekend we drove up to the mountains to a little village/settlement called wandiligong.  it’s a four hour drive, so i normally read until my stomach and head hurt. i took this along and finished it on the way home. amazing. i don’t know why i previously avoided mccarthy, but i’ve never counted him amongst ‘southern gothic’ writers like faulkner and o’connor and welty and mccullers. i sure think differently now. i don’t know a word of spanish but it didn’t matter, i pretended like these adolescent californian boys (old enough to be my grandparents now) pretended they knew what the hell they were doing in mexico, with guns and wild horses and scars across their faces.

what are you reading?

common articles

1. aaron and aoife in old living room/spare bedroom in very early, very hot january.

2. ibid.

3. favourite teacup, presumably containing coffee.

4. upfield bike path near victoria street, brunswick. lovely old factory.

5. poster on sydney road.

6. location of above.

7. falling apart travel agency.

8. sydney road, approx. 11am on easter saturday.

two views of wilderness

in the fifteen minutes before you return home

past the flats on the corner, the quince tree.

mother country

It gets dark here at a quarter to four. London is old and filled with people who will never catch up to Henry’s Tower 1066 or Waterloo Bridge. In a moment she will take a cab to Oxford Street. Christmas. December has passed the point beyond which it looks pretty stupid, in the street with everyone watching, to not wear a hat, scarf, gloves; to not have blue wool spun over blue legs. From a distance London held a few things, slick reds and fire escapes and history itself. It still did, or held a sort of convenience instead, if distance can be reduced to what someone might decide will attract passers-by on a cheap but unfrequented street.

cold hands win again

skating on ice in melbourne, as opposed to paris, is an affair fraught with bad music and spinning disco lights. we tried out the new rink in the docklands a few nights ago, driving through heavy rain we hoped would deter other skaters. no such luck. why melbourne thinks ice-skating isn’t an attractive enough proposition on a sunday night without video clips on a giant screen, without a melodramatic voiceover system, without ‘flashdance’ and ‘thriller’, i don’t know. it was fun, of course, but i could ice-skate to queensland and back on a network of improbably frozen streams and creeks and inlets and still have fun.

and i know very well that people who brandish their foreign cities around in comparison with something totally different, something that isn’t trying to be centuries-old and european, are a little tiring to have to listen to. but skating outside the hotel de ville in the early december dark, needing my coat and gloves and scarf like small, tactile red crosses, groups of teenage boys knocking over anyone in their path, real white street-lamps and genuine cold air, ice scraped down by hours of thin blades, is not something a little summer-clad city can replicate very easily.

i didn’t fall over, but you did, bruising your knees on the hard ice. despite all the literary warnings i have read about reckless children skating on too-thin ponds, drowning or at the very least getting their clothes wet, a music-less, light-less, crowd-less natural environment to skate in, a rock for sitting and lacing cream-coloured leather skates, these are all things i am pinning on canada this year. canada is yet a dream, a snowy donkey, but ice-skating, even in docklands’ flat maze of shops and giant car-parks, connects something to something, somewhere.

everything in the evening

you are the son of a scuba diver,

red shoes and a heartbeat

kit in case it stops working.

you have the manuals for cars

you don’t drive, sweep leaves

into gutters

heron – you steal tinfoil from the birds

and chew it to coral.

three blind trees

In my head I have an image of a girl-child wearing a red coat with a hood over her head, standing with her back to the frame. Strong horizontal rain lashes down at her, streaked white, pocked with crayon. She is frozen in the picture and doesn’t even know it. You would like to touch her, finger the red anorak, but your skin won’t understand that paper is not rough and cold and preserved, that paper should bend and fold to the colours hatched beneath it. Should make you closer to something you haven’t lost, but remember somewhat coolly: the depth of snow before you were born, the faintness of topographical outlines, drawn in grey-lead to facilitate alteration.

Hello wall, she’d say. A wall is a problem of geometry and nothing else. Two glasses of gin, the lime sucked dry, the theatrical falling head, the slip clutched at the breast. You realise you feel safer when people around you are drinking because that’s what made your parents like you when you were young. Two-inch thick shadows, temporal freights in the shape of drying racks, the absolute flatness of a tall building. To step off a reflective office block is the same as walking down stairs; no greater carapace, no further to fall.

The girl in the picture won’t come alive, even if you throw her in the fire in frustration. I went to see someone and everyone was saying, I don’t know how long this will last and anyway how much money do you have? They all want to meet you somewhere it takes a long time to get to, in the sunken cheekbone shadows of bars and alleys and sublime carnivals. The red-coat girl speaks like she’s swallowed a fox, all furry clumps and dark red sputum. She opens her hand to show you a shell or a fish, but the skeleton is gone.