spatial blues

botanic gardens / homebodies

2011-11-18T20:37:00.001+11:00

Hilary's birthday is always in September, and most years she hosts a picnic in the royal botanic gardens. Here she is with a pinata in the shape of a fly!

CLT (vegan) bagel at New Day Rising. The best. Clearly not as in need of focus as Lambros's shirt, however.

Although the shelves in my university library are beige and rattly, they hold some wonders. Here, in my favourite section (810-814ish) I have books on southern grotesque theory and small press experiments and, probably, something by Joan Didion I suddenly wanted to re-read.

Black beans and lime and chili powder and coriander/chile pesto (trust me, that's the bowl in the bottom right) can only mean one thing! Scalding tongues leaning over the saucepan, yes.

flemington to collingwood

2011-11-17T16:34:00.001+11:00

A couple of months ago, with Lambros's yellow van and a borrowed trailer, we helped friends move house. Their old house was a rambling, double-storied castle with re-appearing doors and a staircase that turned back on itself and droopy plaster, and I tried to make cornbread in their broken oven with too little flour and too much milk. It ended up a pudding, but we were hungry and (in my case) bruised, so we ate it straight from the pan, with spoons. Carrying one of the last boxes out the front door, I tried to wedge my hip between the box and the banging fly-screen so the old cardboard box would not scrape and split. But its bottom fell out, and plates and glasses and pots and pans smashed on the tiles. I was too tired to be frightened by the noise, but the mess of ruined crockery was very sad. They were told their house would be torn down and replaced by an apartment block, but there are new tenants there now.

Aaron is an artist of the highest order. I have his illustrations and notes all over my walls. I am lucky.

We had tea and rearranged cut-out paper shapes on another sheet of paper representing their new bedroom, much smaller. Nothing seemed to fit.

L & me bundled up for a winter walk, and out-of-focus foliage.

Mint, and sage (which disappeared one night. I hope the sage thief knows what he has found.) My herb garden now includes thyme and oregano and marjoram and alpine strawberries and I am coaxing a decimated coriander stalk back to life. It is good to look after other things.

Mint, in a water bottle in North Melbourne.

mushrooms // clunes // talbot // autumn too many months ago to count

2011-11-09T20:47:00.006+11:00

a basket of slippery jack mushrooms, collected in a pine forest near a town in central victoria called clunes. slippery jacks are pale yellow and sponge-like on the inside, and needles stick to their slippery brown surfaces. when they are cooked in oil and garlic your kitchen smells like a wet forest fire.

belgian waffles and maps in talbot, a slightly bigger town nearby. talbot is also home to an 1875 railway station that is now a museum and nursery. it was may and there were still figs on the trees.

books et cetera

2011-04-11T18:04:00.003+10:00

these ugly duckling online poetry chapbooks are exactly what i need to curl up with on a night like this, especially after spending too long a few hours ago staring at walls of poetry books, unable to choose which would be mine. i ended up with h.d.'s 'trilogy' and the sound of breaking porcelain. osip mandelstam is particularly good.

one more story

2011-03-31T15:09:00.004+11:00

streets in san francisco, noticeably less snow-encased than the other cities in america we visited. possibly related to this notebook entry? "11 january -- morning washing then through almost-raining streets to 16th and dolores to see the mision san francisco de asis. the oldest mission, unapologetic about its involvement in native american slave labor & conversion to christianity -- a description in the museum said their numbers would have decreased from 300,000 to 150,000 and then even lower anyway,without the presence of the spanish missionaries. the seven sorrows of mary, low coming sky, faded aqua hotel tropicana we did not find to stay in. all the irish and dead children in the cemetery and catholic fourth graders knowing more about father serra than i do."

the previous night we ate squash quesadillas and drank cheap mojitos and fit our limbs into the small bathtub in the acid green unwindowed bathroom and then, unheld by porcelain, into the bed. and i said things and closed my eyes which were antique eyes by that stage. we almost missed the flight from chicago to san francisco, noticing only on the blue line train to o'hare that our plane was scheduled to depart from midway airport, in another direction entirely to where we were headed. so we rushed out into the predawn brown air and hailed a cab. my last image of chicago before the tall walls of the highway swept us around unmappable corners, a chimney laughing black into the sky.

sfmoma. right before peter (a friend of matias) approached, recognising me from a photograph. "do you know anyone from denmark" he said. "yes." "would that be matias?" he wore a scarf around his neck and my voice disappeared, talking, and i said so and he said well i don't know what your voice is like normally so this could be it, the reason your breath is white though it's not very cold, a dragon is hatching eggs in your chest and needs the space, between lungs, to incubate them.

other things in the museum worth noting: an exhibition on voyeurism, "camera concealed in walking cane, wood metal glass" -- the view of a lethal injection chamber from the family witness room, parchman state penitentiary. sophie calle's "the hotel, room 25". cartier-bresson "the modern century" -- fishnets drawn in at nazare, portugal like the beginnings of mourning threads woven by the red fingers of young men, madrid steam and combed stick hair and rosaries, camus with a short cigarette.

the botanic gardens at berkeley.

by the roadside in santa cruz.

picnic in the arboretum at ucsc, because we could not find our way to the actual university campus. sunflower seed baguette, gouda, blueberries.

that night, we drank wine and waited for our bus which left at 11.55 p.m. and heard sea lions barking in the distance. rode a 1911 carousel with real horse-hair for the ponies' tails and metal rings to throw at a painted clown mural, a scary wooden rollercoaster my backbone was thrown against, leaving bruises that made the long bus ride to los angeles even more uncomfortable. and when i ask how are we even going to pay for these drinks, he says, "easily".

flowers, and american

2011-03-30T20:51:00.005+11:00

yesterday lambros gave me ten unfurled red roses. when i came home from an ever-tedious day at work i found them waiting on my desk, long-stemmed and leaves every which way in a large teapot. he said "i left them for you to trim, you know what to do" and i did, but not until today. barely putting down my bag, hardly opening or closing doors, i poured myself some gin and cut their bottoms to fit the sharp-blue and white teapot, tearing leaves from stem in the gentle way of an unemployed gardener. they are redder and darker and looser by the hour.

in my in-between moments today (of proofreading and barrister-name-checking and clock-watching and crisis-of-misspelling-averting, oh i could say so much) i read up about appalachia, the whiskey rebellion, "the whole of west virginia" fitting into this constructed idea of americans living in poverty at the bases of mountains.

coney island day dreams

2011-03-21T13:57:00.003+11:00

i am eating fresh figs (so plump they can barely stay in their skins) from an early-autumn fig tree, and feeling much better after a weekend spent mostly in bed, re-reading 'eating animals' and sleeping for hours and hours. and i am, as always, thankful for lambros, who drives me to doctor's appointments and chemists and brings these figs to me and doesn't mind when i only have enough energy to solve three crossword clues.

beginning in new york: i took the mamiya along to coney island because i thought its hazy, imprecise glow would suit such an odd place.

friends' legs on the boardwalk.

everything was closed, of course, since it was winter. but i had never seen snow intersect with sand before (in my head, i suppose, sand is yellow and therefore hot, and completely incompatible with slowly thawing ice).

there is a certain beauty in the flashiness of these signs. what compels people to visit (and spend vast amounts of money at) carnivals, theme parks, circuses? are we any better for going to one that was closed, and peeking in at the perimeter? i can pretend all i like that the old signs, the unconnected LED bulbs, and the rides suspended in the sky like great stiffened birds held my attraction, but the meaning of the carnival (according to the dictionary sharing the couch with me, [It. carnevale, prob. <>caro (carn-), flesh, and levare, lighten, take away.] the season immediately preceding Lent, observed in Italy and elsewhere with merrymaking and revelry; the festivity of this season; in general, a large, usually public merrymaking; a travelling show with amusements such as side shows and rides; and entertainment) remains, even without the crowds and lights and shrieks. but caro, levare, flesh taken away? in the sense of sweating in fear, or one of those awful rollercoaster accidents that still occur too frequently.

and now we are back in montreal in fall, climbing mont royal with apples.

i am so proud of this last photograph.

old snow across north america

2011-03-17T10:43:00.009+11:00

in keeping with our penniless habits, we waited until last week to develop & scan these photographs, though they were taken almost another lifetime ago, in late december and early january, and on another continent entirely. in australia, as we liked to say, "you go to the snow". in america it comes to you instead of rain. this is terribly obvious, i know, to those who grew up with real winters, but it still took me by flagrant surprise.

ice-skating on beaver lake on the top of mont royal in montreal. the perfect escape from the flat, cold, running-from-open-door-to-cafe-to-supermarket reality winter takes on in december after the first stunning is over.

downtown montreal, near rue st catherine or on rue st catherine or maybe there isn't even a street called rue st catherine in montreal and i have already forgotten my imprecise, superimposed map. collecting lambros' french certificate from his school.

deep in rural quebec, where there are towns called "melbourne" and "asbestos" and "tingwick".

one of my many woolly-stockinged walks. dear stockings, you were as warm as your color promised that day.

snow-lights and windows blurred of all their occupants.

a children's ice rink in the inner suburbs of montreal. one night, we crept onto one and held hands and slid all over the place in our boots until the rink's guard asked us in polite french to please not do that. it is dangerous. you can fall right through the ice, or at least weaken the surface for other skaters.

my lost furry hat. last seen (possibly) in a cafe in quebec that was so displaced-french-in-cold-climates even the baked beans had pork in them.

weekday nowadays

2011-02-28T20:44:00.010+11:00

I don't go to work on Mondays, so I can do things like haphazardly finish cleaning the house before The Inspection (including becoming a Human Vacuum Cleaner after our mechanical one passed away, kick-sweeping the front porch, and concealing certain non-permitted felines), ride my bicycle through the rain down the only path I ever take to reach the center of Brunswick, buy choy sum and string beans and mushrooms from an empty grocery store and wish I had enough money to buy honey, sleep on the floral couch, listen to records on the floral couch, and write and read and wait for Lambros to come home from university. I finished the last twenty pages of Marie Darrieussecq's A Brief Stay with the Living on the front step, smoking and pausing every two or three paragraphs to prolong its incredible ending.

there are ruins in san francisco

2011-01-25T15:12:00.009+11:00

inside the greenhouse in golden gate park, inspecting orchids. does anyone else always say "orchards" instead of "orchids" and vice versa?

there are bison in a paddock in the middle of the park. once, long ago, they escaped and roamed through the adjacent suburb of richmond. police lured them back into their paddock with food.

i was so excited to learn there was an operating camera obscura near the sutro baths ruins in san francisco. it's a funny old tourist trap: pay three dollars and step into a small dark room with the operator, who explains how the light is projected onto the white disc in front of you, then leaves. we watched the surrounding world rotate twice and then said, "we have been in here long enough, he will probably become suspicious" and dis-entranced ourselves.

the nineteenth-century bathing house burnt down completely in 1966 and can now be wandered over, camera in hand. in 1896 this was the largest indoor swimming pool in the world (thanks wikipedia!)

locomotive morning

2011-01-01T01:05:00.002+11:00

“I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money”, and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of living there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not live at Xanadu.”

(full essay here)

goodbye montreal where it hasn't snowed heavily in over a week and the sidewalks are brimming with ash-coloured snow, hello new york i won't really believe in until i run my hands over fence railings. yesterday i bought a red suitcase for $20 and filled it with books, traipsed over town looking for places to sell other, unloved school books, stood in line at an instant-chequer and watched a man roll and unroll carpets so as to move their dirt onto the floor. "we will have to take a photo of you, for the next time you come in," even though i never will.

more exploded light

2010-12-30T07:17:00.002+11:00

it's 3.19 on a wednesday afternoon. we catch a train to new york on saturday & still have books to sell, extra suitcases to purchase, and bars to drink final whiskey sours in. instead of attending to those necessary tasks (necessary and impossible -- the contents of this room will never again fit in two backpacks) i am cutting up an old blue silk skirt to make a headband and dreaming of copenhagen in late summer.

gilded toronto

2010-12-20T10:00:00.016+11:00

on the 12th of november, lambros & i walked in the early morning cold to laurier station where we took a train to the gare centrale in montreal for our bus to toronto.

it was a megabus, a fairly cheap canadian & north new york state bus company that promises $1 fares but really costs $30 or so. the bus stops once on a roadside somewhere in ontario where you can buy tim hortons or serve-yourself coffee and tea from a lady who says, when you are struggling to count change late at night, "it's all right, dear, i'm here all night. take your time." on the way there, i bought black coffee and smoked in the cold sharp morning sun, and lambros had a bagel with cream cheese. in retrospect, he says it was "ashen." not a montreal bagel.

this is a blurry photograph i took of blur-bros.

and this is a blurry photograph of me outside a historic school that i wanted to go into but it was closed and i think only open to school groups anyway. sidenote: in montreal at parties or at any time really people leave bottles of white wine and beer in the snow on balconies to keep cold. sidenote: people also put frozen blackberries in their room-temperature cider to cool it down.

lanterns in a window in chinatown. the street signs in toronto are very careful to tell you which district you are in at any given moment. one block little portugal, one block little italy. you should never be confused about whether the bakeries will offer pierogies or croissants.

it was still autumn/fall in toronto so we played in leaves.

streetcar tracks, nostalgia for melbourne trams.

two different kinds of coffee-drinkers, linked by the fluorescent vest of a construction worker.

i like toronto's lack of prettiness. black, ironically-titled bars next to fading sausage companies. flat, wide streets that only widen in the fog. our luck there: on the first night, accidentally entering the royal ontario museum through an unmarked and unguarded back entrance, skipping the exorbitant fee and flickering quickly from jewelled korean combs to dinosaurs to nests to carved narwhal tusks, hoping no-one would catch us and demand to see our tickets. natural history exhibits, jars of coral and bones, typewritten labels in capital letters. dead birds arranged like pairs of socks in like colours.

and then at night slipping into ronnie's local to drink whiskey in the front window and listen to the bartenders and a girl with tinsel blue hair.

waaaaaaaaaalking.

a lot of buildings in toronto are made of those dark brown smooth bricks i associate with 1996 and also 1972 and discovering the coldness of bricks in the library at my high school at the end of each aisle, curling up on lonely summer lunchtimes. still in november hallowe'en decorations hung on front gates in the streets you turn down that turn out like quiet suburban white-posted streets only they are metres away from crowded commercial streets. skinless gaping pumpkins and very white cobweb tendrils on knee-high fences. angle-roofed houses next to tattoo parlors and dollar stores and accounting firms with newspaper clippings in the window, ketchup on the table before you sit down in a heavy red plastic costume.

we slept on the third floor of a very, very cheap hostel that always smelt like spring rolls but a private room is always something good to come by. even if you do not sleep through the toronto night and are woken up by whispers and then again after dawn. we drank ethiopian honeywine and devoured injera. i want to scoop up lentils and red cabbage with soft sour bread and know why eating food with my fingers beats silverware any time.

staring at maps in the art gallery of ontario. we also visited an antique market that had a rolliflex camera for $500 (as usual), furs everywhere from thickened cream bear to red to brown rubbed the wrong way and looking through a box of old postcards and bits of cardboard encased in plastic, the stall's proprietor talking angrily, self-consciously, about an alarm clock at auction that went for too high a price because of the man who owned it, a minor celebrity.

and after not-very-long in toronto we returned on the bus to our little house in montreal with boxed sandwiches and i read foucault on the bus, a 2000-page norton anthology of theory and criticism balanced on my knee. november undoes its stitches in a hard one-way lane among types of dinginess not seen elsewhere. puritan fabric, "brave as a clown with crossed eyes, i walk from" are the words that end my toronto notes.

copenhagen, light

2010-10-19T13:27:00.009+11:00

a collection of photographs from copenhagen in early august.
they were taken on an old mamiya 135 that clearly has problems with keeping light in.
but i think the majesty of greenhouses is well-suited to such a camera, which gives everything a halo.

l'ancienne

2010-10-11T04:02:00.003+11:00

i don't seem capable at all of chronological or even contemporaneous sharing of events, thoughts, sights, so here is another journal entry.

19 august.
canal outside royal library.
a blue rope is strung up over the canal edge, blue like nothing underwater. noosed at one end. 'Danisco' on the other side of the water on a red brick building three storeys high. arched windows for the top storey - an attic? no, of course not an attic, people do not store and collect things above them anymore. the shape of the windows follows the shape of the ceiling but inside there are just desks and plastic lamps and pastel-coloured/toned maps showing non-existent, non-continuous countries. motivational posters hang from beams, safety guidelines decorate the walls. L attempting to fish a plastic bag from the water with the bluerope - clanking of metal loops - I take two photographs, one when the sun re-emerges.

elinberg lutzen: linocuts from the faroe islands. patchwork witches, the image of a long dining table, empty white plates. in someone else's nightmare you have heard of and made your own. a king with a jagged, three-pronged crown. directionless rain. some the size of postcards, some larger. leaves with shooting stems and medieval whiteness left around trees, anything of nature - reverence. we see grey where black intersects most with white. fish in the sky, gemini.

september (greyer)

2010-10-07T02:12:00.003+11:00

some pictures taken by lambros. i am almost undignified by study but don't have class until one tomorrow so have allowed myself a few hours of nothing-doing. in other words i am showing you photos, drinking pink cider that evaporates in my mouth, and searching for woolen tights.

"good rye"

2010-09-22T12:55:00.002+10:00

-- crossing st viateur to catch the bus this morning, correct change in my hand, noticing a leaf in the shape of a hair comb on the ground. it wasn't tortoiseshell or i would have picked it up, plus i was late already.

-- sometimes it's too much trouble to flip the record and you end up listening to side four again and again and again.

-- after class, bought camels even though i still have a few duty-free packets. it was cold and i had bare thighs (under a skirt!) and wanted to walk home, if only just to look at the footpath along avenue du parc where leaves in another fall left perfect moulds in the concrete. there were six or seven police cars outside the soccer field near jeanne mance, maybe a dozen officers leaning on them. calm and unalert. i met lambros and we walked to le club social for gin and beer. the lonely planet says it has a "lively ambience" but we like it anyway. i did some critiques for poetry class and tried to put dirt on his new boots without attracting his attention and i guess it worked, as things done for no real purpose do. we bought almond milk and dates and soy ice-cream and other necessities and came home and he cooked real food and i ate ice-cream and raspberries and mint tea and worked on a poem that began with russians and ended up with anatomies of deep sea fish and bioluminescence and i don't know how.

self, self

2010-09-22T01:45:00.003+10:00

hello world!

i have two poems in the latest going down swinging, in my opinion one of the best australian lit journals. unfortunately i can't read it in canada, but if you're in australia, you know what to do.

p.s. fez do you have a copy you could photograph for me maybe?

the woods are lovely, dark and deep

2010-09-17T01:47:00.002+10:00

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

i think the poems i love most are those that make you think of things without even obliquely mentioning them. a poem you know to be grey even though the word 'grey' is invisible. this poem by robert frost does that. it's about holding your hat firmly to your head even though there's no wind, how anything buried becomes treasure, and - most of all - that moment of decision, of realisation of how to solve an ugly situation, that makes you giddy with love for the person you hate.

on undressing like you say

2010-09-14T05:17:00.002+10:00

late yesterday afternoon lambros & i decided to walk to a record store about fifteen minutes from our apartment, further up saint-laurent. we bought a small record player on friday for $30 from someone on craigslist & only had, so far, dirty three's 'whatever you love, you are', and some early muddy waters recordings to listen to. it's a funny area (i would say 'queer' if i were a hundred years older and less robust) - you turn off saint-viateur and commerce stops, all of a sudden. there are still signs for artisan boulangeries hanging red and wrought in the air, but the windows are filled with dirty white curtains. crossing the road under the highway/freeway is always a little scary, there's no pedestrian crossings or even a straight line to walk, really. we both saw the pattern and curved shape of the old warehouse building opposite, but he was the only one brave enough to stop in the middle of the road and take a photograph of it.

in the record store lives a grey cat. and there are listening tables set up with record players and headphones. and i found two juliette greco records & i bought them and listened to them, later, writing a poem about russians i have no right to place in my poems & make say things and wear fur hoods. that's a problem i keep coming up against. how to take myself out of poems & put other people in them without subjecting them to my aesthetic demands & needs & mutating tendency.

slide film, europe

2010-09-13T11:43:00.005+10:00

photographs from europe (mostly germany) i took on slide film. my first foray into the medium of positive images and blanketing colour. most of these feature (or were taken under the instruction of) lambros who is currently reading in the lamplit kitchen listening to records on our somewhat-portable record player. portable so far as electricity extends. notsofar. this is the man who reminds me, patiently, that low apertures equal more light and 200 speed film will blur indoors. he's not normally so glary when he eats felafel.

two records only

2010-09-13T06:04:00.002+10:00

30 august. montreal is very warm. it is the last of summer and it knows it. waiting to use washing machine at hostel. louise gluck on truth & authenticity in poetry. milton and keats. poetry is insight or else intelligent comment. red roses over me reading near the old port. the way milton uses 'dark' out of kilter in the middle of a line ('phone sex is a job not a lifestyle') to show us how dark. jobs for anglophones here seem mostly to be dreary or suggestive. nightclub photographer, telemarketer, clerk, university study where you plunge your arm into cold water, causing some brief pain. tonight we go to collect key & deposit books at apartment, will take flowers but not hyacinths. what i think gluck was saying was make things up if you want to, pretend you were on the ship, in the harbour, sorting rocks from wreck debris and dropped gull eggs.

31 august. train to guy concordia. very old woman in aqua suit w/ yellow spots. lace silk blouse, gold earrings and white brogues. fine dove grey hair holding onto rail watching out window.

12 september. cornsilk blouse? "i like the way you look when you smile with a beard". anne sexton collected poems you bought for me instead of the selected, in the window. earl grey tea brings to my nose something heady and floral and heavy (here i describe for you the properties of tea as they arise in advertising) like an armful of flowers blocking your sight as you walk down st viateur. the imperialist, advena & hugh meeting only on streets against fences under umbrellas, their fanciful language but real real real description of how it is to love somebody and crack under the weight of it. the lover as egg. hatchling.

september the third

2010-09-04T11:56:00.003+10:00

- standing outside lozeau on st-hubert, holding a roll of developed slide film up to the light, all the different faces of you i have taken and stilled.

- perfect noisette ice-cream to make the twenty minute walk along unshaded industrial streets less exhausting.

- editing the poem i want to workshop in class next wednesday, provisionally and probably lazily titled 'ii'. 'solar system' to 'constellation' and everything aligns.

- water out of a bottle with an 89 cent sticker on the lid.

- our new apartment from 1911, shared with three others, a wall of polaroids, a balcony that managed not to collapse under the weight of guests last night huddled in, despite the heat that didn't break but burst into lightening, a cracking roof and a constant fan.

i saw a photograph of her smoking

2010-09-03T01:30:00.004+10:00

in profile, terse and complete. Ásta Sigurðardóttir.
i want to know as much about her as possible. all i can find is an obituary that says 1930-1971 and names of stories in icelandic, untranslated.
i dreamt i flew down on all my friends in a baltic city that had no name, and suzanne was there dressed as a witch - a summary witch, the median of every costume she has ever worn - and to be taken seriously she had to change her name so the first was the same as the last, and call herself "monsieur".

first page

2010-08-25T07:26:00.002+10:00

16 august. location: kongens nytorv metro, copenhagen. time: two minutes to two in the afternoon.
things seen today: elderly american tourist with perfect coral-red lips and a blue summer hat. one tall peroxided boy ordering coffee at a bagel store, waiting outside with cigarette. all trains to roskilde cancelled or severely delayed after we had bought tickets (the heaviest rain since 1931 two nights ago). wondering still why the french impressionist rooms in the ny carlsberg glyptotek smelled so sweet, like wet brown sugar. what was behind the frames that they wanted to make us leave at 5 pm, what was there to let out? damp gauguin, mouldy monet. or nothing (my head hurts and this is irreversible).

- "they're thinking of building one, but - "
- "yeah."
- "it may not be possible, the ocean floor is really, really soft."

living in one place for an extended time requires a willingness to make things up, to invent meanings for familiar signs, to see an inferno under the calm lake (where ducks eat night moths and the sun dies, striated). to pretend windows on the opposite side of the water are less opaque, not so veiled and reflective. but there is no need to do that now.
we are young, smoke lucky strikes, underdressed - watch moths chase light underwater though it's no deeper than epidermis or colour. shower walls are cold, cold, so i arch my back against them and recoil - flickering from warmth to deep bloodless cold. showers are good places to shudder in. never clean entirely when travelling - always some unwashed hair or muddy shoes or cobwebs in my scarf. the thing is to forget what it was like not to be born and let the smog drag over you, walk under the traffic lights without flinching or going out, brave as a cloud with crossed eyes.

notes from the note-book

2010-08-16T08:01:00.002+10:00

-- kupferstichkabinett. now staying in neukolln, in a two room falling apartment on the third floor. no light in the bathroom at night, pipes bandaged in foil. hans hartung, art informel and the consequences. bird confronting winter forest, national lost sock directory, bird on the other side of sticks. L 1966-9 B: magnified cut-edged photo or slide made entirely darker - white empty spaces and grey white-dotted space below - white human smear in the lower right. murkiness. showing but trying not to - hiding instinctively, colour itself dances - pigments blur, move, sustain the world as water-blurred, leaking from straight lines inwards, outwards.

-- to reappear in harlem in a red velvet dress, kind mit fischen, swelling cheeks, waiting next to two big-eyed red fish she does not look at on a plate that curves abruptly into shadow.

-- 1 august. berlin-dresden train 12.36 departure. now german countryside for the first time ever in my eyes. wheat fields, green tractors. the ticket inspector, a tall spectre of a man with white hair standing on ends, punched and stamped our ticket. this morning i woke tangled clothesless in white sheets trying to see the churchtower clock from the window but my neck would not twist far enough. but it was still early so i walked down the sixty-three steps, through the courtyard, under the scaffolding (permanent, supportive) and into the street. a bakery was open with croissants, juice, sweet brown bread and strawberry jam. and then back to collect our room-strewn belongings. all my stockings are laddered and i drank too much lovely subtle french cidre but i finished a poem, contorted my body, learnt how to count the clock, how many rings for an hour, found another place with enough air left for me to breathe.

-- 3 august. it is raining in dresden and everybody was prepared for it except me. they have umbrellas and rainjackets or at least benign facial expressions and wet limp hair.

berlin bedtime story

2010-07-31T01:18:00.002+10:00

things seen at the berlin flohmarkets: alarm clocks, old cameras, soft-serve ice cream, slaughterhouse 5 which i refused to buy, old cases of slides (bought some of an ancient dress-up party). clothes and shoes from unknowable places. history is only as long as the people who sell it to you. an old passport with stamps in chronological order (something i have long argued for). a man with a beard (oh! i know him) who is now laying in the grass beside me. in arkonplatz's circular garden with the smell of growing string beans and fat bumblebees. remember: marigolds in greece. the consequences of unalloted silence.

a sign: "every/body/learns/from/disaster". where are we? i love this place. tall candles, soft jazz, cheap strong coffee. nosferatu - the girl wakes gasping and outstretched-arms from sleep, over and over. again and again.

emil nolde: version of madonna flat against a gold backdrop. pink stripes on face signify bones. heavy brow. planed face. reclining female nude melting to the paper's edges. "dream 1947" radius & radiant. few dabs of colour - wide soulless blue - blue opening in cloud-scratched sky. taking her to a path bordered with long firey torches. ecstasy is a body eaten by shadows. the strangeness of courting, blackbirds fall. "thora" oil on burlap. patchy eyes - ragdoll - shadowy figure in background. lips a deeper red, like she has washed them of paint herself or painted over a natural glowingness. paint like bandages, like creosote. showing but also concealing her. redhead under umbrella or cloud or squid, perfect watercolour. nolde's quotation, "i want to buy a house with a large barn for my paintings to hang in... so no one sees them other than a single wayfarer who has lost his way".

centrifog

2010-07-28T08:05:00.002+10:00

athens: statue with sphinx eyes, black-centred. still amazed by robes cut out of stone - the development of movement over centuries in the heaviest materials. sea marble with old fossils. old old old everything here is so old except us. red-roofed buildings spreading to the mountains, city lights seen from a landing plane always seem to me the mirror image of constellations, flattened on the ground. we draw lines that are not really there.

---

imperatives in poetry must be simple, cold, damning somehow, reversed - an instruction that is also a plea, a direction to take control, to be strong instead. tell me when to go.

---

openable skies in paris.
i look for you
along with everyone else -

let him in, let him in. there are
others, always, with lonely mouths
to follow in abeyance

of standing too long under
screens of flight paths where
all disruption is numeric,

translated. they buy soft
packets of cigarettes and dream
about anchors, poised

and heavy as a virgin.
bloodshot remains of altitude
in eyes parenthesed to cheek.

i want something
resembling nothing i can conjure
between walls thick

with departure, insulated
against delay.

---

a big thick book of hannah arendt's essays bought for me at the judisches museum in berlin. so i can learn about things i should already know, and so i am not lost for somewhere to put my eyes waiting for trains or the sun to come up. one wing displays items or mementos of particular jewish families, refugees or dead - a suitcase large enough to hold the possessions of two people on their way to a concentration camp, their names scrawled on the inside. these possesions (violins, combs, candy bowls) are weighty with history, our almost pre-knowledge that imbues these items with an urgency they can't possibly contain.

well i have left it this late so it may as well be big

2010-07-26T03:17:00.002+10:00

paris

pantheon: stone is solemn-making. flags and flowers for the duc. curved ceilings to encourage the movement of atoms or souls. black funerary wreaths and blackened old flowers. well false flowers are scarier. hearts in handled pots: whole or burned ash? pendulum - yellow mesmerising globe but a man had to come and set it to 15.30, the wind and breath of a thousand daily tourists disrupts the mechanism.

in the jardin des plantes, a dark shadowed path bordered by maple trees - the astonishing smell of unadorned maple syrup (attached in my head to winter, to absent snow). musee d'histoire naturelle: the thin central bones of a salmon skeleton, fine as hairs, easily broken barriers for organs, inner tissue to escape through. half-shelled turtles. poulain - foal - equus caballus - yellowed bone. names translated through language and science are not the same thing at all, mean entirely different lenses for looking at this creature. springs hold jaws together. cat in blue liquid. the inside of tortoise shell a topographical map. a human foetus butterfly-displayed on blue velvet. adolescent skulls not yet fused - older ones in the process of cracking. chat thoracodelphe - the science of monsters - la teratologie. reading religious or divine meanings into abnormal births before the nineteenth century - as if god used a kind of nascent braille of lumps, fusions, exteriorities. fossils are impressions in stone, gills diamond etchings in rock of prehistoric (but this is a museum of history) animals. backlit butterflies in the galerie d'evolution. the centrepiece of this museum is a stampede of still animals. the three stages of taxidermy - depoillage, tannage de la peau, le montage. white netting - polystyrene example. imputrescible. a room of things humans have killed or are killing or will, eventually and pending nothing, kill.

anna & bernhard blume. polaroids of paranormal scenes, flashes in bourgeois homes. mirrored repeated peaches, glowing wooden chairs. shadows on tiles, red light in unlocatable form. a surgeon's gloved hand opens a chest (which is meat) superimposed on a real chest. there is something larger at work here: boris kudryavov - miroir de la guerre. wet shadows of men on dark streets bisected by light.

11 july, avenue gambetta. waiting with flowers (yellow almost daisies but not - 'sponge blossom' says lambros). left the loft to look at pere-lachaise and of course it began to rain immediately. heavy afternoon rain, slow but insistent, bringing the colours of the cemetery into relief - red flowers, white granite, blue copper stains. enormous crypts - 'pour ma fille mort en mer, 24 ans et demi'. lost my camera charm, bought this morning, somewhere among the cobblestones or the wet streets spreading out from the cemetery. but the heavy impersonal rain was a relief after the recent heat, which kept the windows open all night and our bodies far apart so not to make it worse for one another.

panic

2010-07-01T20:24:00.003+10:00

appears in many forms. leaning over the bathroom sink to cut my hair shorter and shorter. eating a zucchini and garlic for dinner because my fingers were shaking too much to make anything else. smoking, smoking, smoking.

airports are enormous, white places. you can't control them, they have special operating control centers for that and they won't let you in there. not even if you tell them how much calmer it would make you, how much more able to walk down the shrinking corridors and onto that plane, how much more inclined to sit sensibly in your allocated seat and not pace frantically up the aisle or demand gin or breathe heavily on the window to make sure it won't shatter.

facsimile

2010-06-26T17:54:00.003+10:00

(some poems don't quite hold when you look back over them two or three years after the event. and some are so thinly built that further editing is impossible, you can't get back into the same mindset. i think, maybe, this is one of those.)

Scare-crow morning
hair on end, black eyes frozen
an inky woman
humouring the milk bar
with her talk of triumph

fire without coal. She plays
church organ on Sundays
& Tuesday evenings
whom are you seeking
o queen on a silver coin?

“I will never
not know you again”
first touch of radiator
skin burns space
and time as horsehair

sticks to leather boots.
Strange intimacy:
petticoat overcoat fall
twist crackle,
sleeping guard at the resurrection

bends wrist, a folded bill, blood-thinner

not nepotistic at all, and other cowardly sayings

2010-06-20T21:02:00.002+10:00

you should probably be reading this blog if you're not already, not only for beautiful photographs but also for detailed tutorials that even a technical numbskull like me can understand. he's the friendly, argyle-sweater wearing teacher you wish you had.

whiskey and lime, 8.55 p.m.

2010-06-20T20:47:00.002+10:00

i'm working on a small project at the moment that doesn't really have a purpose apart from providing me with a structure within which to write, a thematic comfort that means i don't flounder wildly trying to pull ideas and images and senses and phrases from the big bad world all at once. that never quite works.

it's called 'problems of geometry' and i've probably cornered most of you in bars and kitchens and alleyways at some point to try to explain it. sorry about that. in brief, it explores human interactions with space and objects, interiors and exteriors, drainpipes pressing into your back while you kiss a stranger, wondering why the old man you saw on the ground in a department store was bleeding from the head when there was nothing sharp nearby (can blunt force produce blood? that sort of thing).

iii.

it has been your skin
since may and i have nothing
to show for it except bruises
rising like electrodes
on my chest.

there is never
any sugar under my clothes
though i promised sweetness
like my body could become
an epithet, could be repeated and so
lose meaning, as heavy as dresden

or chartres, china blue. when we wait
for each other we are
not modern, we do not know
the ship has sunk, the train has left,
the light has snapped.
born overnight and not separated

entirely until morning; globes
dimming slower and slower;
new blood in new places.
the narrow stairs and the lock
i forget how to open.

proceeding cautiously

2010-06-19T21:54:00.005+10:00

he takes the photos, i just upload them capriciously while drinking $7 aldi wine. bent street china, outside for oxygen at the harvest launch, scrabble in fez's maze-like house, keepin' warm at the tram stop, walkin' in footscray (plus man with hot chips), carrot cake and bonsoy coffee when he steals me away from the silent grey building for half an hour at lunch, and bean/capsicum/lime salad & tofu stuffed mushrooms.

collectable

2010-06-16T21:48:00.000+10:00

exsanguination

to walk through a window is a problem
of geometry where glass slicks
down and skin subtracts from skin.

electricity in the form of a dead
possum under the clematis
and past all muscle, no longer held down

by organ weight,
traipsed this way andthat
in a bloody hopscotch

fluorescent with flies. could we
talk about this later, could we talk
about it not at all, a monster without bones

or skull to speak of
holding a corner of fresh linen to your face
so he couldn't understand,

it happens all the time
in the wild only
they'd know there to clean it up better,

not to leave it where something bigger
could smell the way over the fence.
when you looked in the window

they said you saw him, a wrong reflection
of what should have been
solid flesh in satin, and when you turned

your veins insideout and wrecked
their solar system with glass,
you became other things entirely

broke the lines of a body
you knew too well, knew better than genus,
centigrade, palpitate: possumskull

hung over the front door like mistletoe.

a city with no alarms

2010-06-15T20:37:00.002+10:00

melbourne: we're going to leave you very soon, for a long time. in a way for always. you won't be like this again, which is okay, it would be prudish to expect otherwise. it's getting colder and colder outside and nightriding along unlit paths comes more often. so does crossing my legs on a wooden schoolhouse chair in a mess of records, tissue paper, inexplicable crystal liqueur glasses and old teapots. i walk around you a lot now thanks to a broken bicycle. it feels odd when i don't hold your hand. i like how your laws make me hang cigarettes from my bottom lip until i go out the door, avoiding the windiest corners, rubbing stiff red hands together. you make arthritics of all of us.

new harvest, socks from here, coffee from here. gas heaters that remind me of feverishly praying every night before sleeping as a child that my house wouldn't burn down, though no one in that house smoked, let alone would be inclined to leave stoves on, fireplaces alive.

practising, slowly

2010-06-14T18:35:00.006+10:00

this is a poem from a few weeks ago. yes/no?

problems of geometry

the day after the crash
he hadn't cleaned his mouth,
would not retrace with sponge or cloth
(pretend likeness of the skin's
warm cell ensembles, those small
holes you are always about to escape from)
the estuaries of his red stain:
cardiopulmonary resuscitation,
what you might call CPR
instead of crossing yourself

but in the front seat, going nowhere
and stuck in soon-to-be firewood
her lips were too slack to grip,
airways mismapped and oxygen would
not stay put inside her
but curdled in the unanswerable
coldness of the car's interior,

a still fog sleeping when you step
outside in the morning

only finer and forgetting time
and time again and they would ask him that later,
to place events in sequence
but his hot breath in the cold car
clouded the dashboard clock,

and the first on the scene
(men downing hoses and removing
leather gloves, yellow overalls)
said her hands couldn't
have been in that position, they
were clasped around a straw basket
not anywhere near the wheel,
said he was odd, not grieving
but shouting, his mouth
a common red circle both that day
through the smoke and later,
as witnesses, they all remembered
his papery face bordered poppy-red,
but wouldn't go into it.

this is halifax when it exploded:

this is where

2010-06-12T21:19:00.004+10:00

coffee is almost finished, three cups for three mornings
i almost spent a long time with my head under towels
lamps are used exclusively
clothes are lost and found like sheep

one of my favourite poems

2010-06-12T19:54:00.007+10:00

that i return to over and over again, looking for turns and angles and tones that will make my own poetry better, is frances leviston's 'humbles'. it's online here:

i like how long her sentences run for several lines (the same thing i like about sharon olds), mutating and skipping away from initial meaning. humbles expands biblically from a small, particular scene into something huge. big things are more terrifying than small things, even if those small things involve blood and viscera.

autumn, melbourne

2010-05-24T20:23:00.007+10:00

the first cat i ever owned was a long-haired ginger stray called tiger. he lived until he was seventeen or eighteen and i was nine or ten, and the last night he was alive i remember him walking around the garden looking at everything for the last time. maybe he had a premonition, or maybe cats just know these things. i knew what he was doing (anxious children are very pessimistic, much more so than adults, and they also know things about time and situational rituals that grown-ups don't, didn't ever or forgot somewhere between eggs florentine and mahogany bedroom furniture) and followed him. he looked at the fuchsias and the parsley. he sat under the washing line for a while. he scratched along all the low outside windowsills and howled when it started to rain, drawing me back outside to rescue him.

four legged clover

2010-05-07T20:28:00.004+10:00

on the mornings when you cannot get out of bed, this is what you do. tell yourself that no-one will notice your scraggly hair, yesterday's make-up, and general slovenliness. close your bedroom door silently. wash your face, then go to the kitchen. make very strong coffee in a tarnished stove-top pot. make porridge with steel-cut oats, soy milk, walnuts, dates, cinnamon, feijoa and molasses. read the only person you can read on mornings like this, joan didion. return to bedroom. gather clothes and linen and put in washing machine as if this was something you bother to do more than once a week. open blinds; open window. smoke two cigarettes. think about things other than yourself.

i've made enough friends

2010-05-03T21:26:00.000+10:00

for some reason, i only ever listen to the wrens in autumn.