Today

Mons

SNOW

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Blinds

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

the venetian blinds are always getting dusty again

Spiral

There is the moment in which the thought is formed

In some stressful irresolution that must secure peace

At an early stage, just beyond the learning contest;

Confidence will dictate the level of known concern,

Doubt may serve as a truer warning of fortune’s way.

Tested through the years by experience and observation,

Remarked upon as effecting the turn of conversations

And even the manner of dress and the way of walking,

The thought of the moment is submerged and preserved

Never to be entirely altered or entirely dismissed

Because it is a vital merger that is all that is known

Of this subject to this person in these circumstances.

To say it is fully determined is to dramatise the case

Which is open at every moment to revision by someone new

And is viewed in its perspective as a younger, simpler self

Dealing with vicissitude and blessing as best it could.

Besides, the thought is a new thought, more real,

More necessary and inspiring than anything that is read

Or written for the delectation and edification of minds;

It is the most and best that can be hoped for

Even if coming from the pains of contradiction.

From being subsumed the thought of that moment, which is

In likelihood a moment deep indebted to all previous moments

That could possibly have led to such a turn of eventfulness,

Becomes assumed in the actions and bearing and attitude,

That thought amongst other hidden thoughts in the subject

That remain widely unknown to all and even the subject

Yet which lead them on to make such general pontificals

As, oh yes that’s them to a T, what else do you expect,

Yes, that’s the nature of the beast – leaving it at that.

But the thought of the moment is no one else’s business,

It makes it easier to breathe, easier to see and feel.

So that what she said in her letter serves the understanding

And recognition of how the intelligence develops,

When she said that it is like being on a spiral staircase,

Seeing from a higher curve in the climb the same thought

At a lower level below and behind you and to your left;

That you are on the same purposeful ascent of thinking

In which body, life and thought are not discontinuous.

Sunrise

Cheque

Fine

Footpaths

Footpaths       

A footstep

marked in cement

            dried fast,

            or initials

bound by choice,

            mischievous assertion:

            one rectangle

in the furlongs

            of footpaths

lined into earth.

            Houses, lots

            past gates

into parochial elysiums,

            down upgrades,

            slight inclines,

            squiggly shadows,

            cracked bases

            chunked, chipped.

Which is the way

            partly chosen,

            more accepted

for inward arguments,

torment and explanation,

            prayers, musings,

            or conversation

            with myself

and you in me.

Vague hellos to walkers,

            overturned precepts

            (boronia scents)

but not imprecations,

            salutations, pleas

to the sky,

            softest blue

            cloudy edged

            favourite deception

with few answers,

            no words.

            Shuffling petals,

            leaves, feathers

            entertain sight

but pass into earth’s

            rich enjoyment.

            Yet skies

            resolutely lovely

            cure imagination’s

despairs and fantasias

            beyond explanation,

wherever stepping goes

            light filled:

it must be.

Table

Forty years ago a table placed on a Melbourne footpath meant only one thing, it was being left out for hard rubbish. The concept that you would sit on a bentwood chair in broad daylight, in full view of everyone, and consume a cup of coffee (with a Florentine confectionery) would have scandalised my Edwardian forebears: “You are drinking? In the street?” They were not puritanical but simply inherited the customs of their English ancestors. In their world eating and drinking was done indoors, even the idea of sneaking a block of chocolate while travelling on public transport was unthinkable. No one ever ate in public.

Melbourne has a noble history of coffee consumption. It was one of the earliest imports. In 1898 Professor Marshall-Hall opened his new Conservatorium of Music in a Coffee Palace on Rathdowne Street. Gaggia machines hissed their way through the 20^th century. In the past ten years the city’s laneways have gone from alternative to mainstream as more get decked out with clubs, tiny shops, and cafes, all in the spirit of historian Weston Bate’s phrase, “essential but unplanned.”  It has been observed that if imports of the coffee bean ceased tomorrow the entire metropolis would suffer a collective nervous breakdown.

It is difficult from memory to say exactly when the first table and chairs were positioned nonchalantly in front of which little café, but I think I recall drinking caffe latte outside Tiamos in Lygon Street Carlton by say 1985. Is that right? It was the most sensible development imaginable, though the upright and competitive stalled progress a while with their rules and regulations for street cafes. Sitting outside is the most obvious thing to do, it is amazing it took so long. Reports of street cafes in earlier times enliven cultural history books, but they are a rare sight, like bohemians at a mayoral ball.

Of course, although Melbourne blithely enjoys its Italian inheritance these days, the phenomenon of the Mediterranean streetscape complete with tables, chairs, a swirl of waiters and a jig of baristas has become well-nigh universal in the big cities of the world. Even London, a place my great-aunts would contemplate with a misplaced nostalgia, they’d never been there, even London is now lined with café tables and the sight of locals warming their stiff upper lips with a scalding cappuccino. They retreat indoors if the wind gets bitter or the Radiohead is too loud, but there is something about Londoners attempting to be continental in public that says the times have changed forever.

Not that all is sweetness and light froth. It was about ten years ago that I first heard of apartments being designed both in the city and the suburbs, without a kitchen. This offended a very basic instinct instilled in me since childhood: the world revolves around the kitchen table. Whether it’s breakfast to start the week, a restorative dinner en famille, or a weekend feast with ten or twenty hoeing in, the kitchen is the centre of life. And I don’t just mean the food but the talk. Half the talk of the world goes on around the kitchen table! Half the things you ever learn in life are heard at the kitchen table. How could you not have a kitchen?

The answer, I was told by someone in the know, is that these apartments are for modern people who eat out. Presumably they are measuring out their lives in coffee spoons on the footpath. But somehow this is not café society in the traditional or fashionable sense, nor is it society in any real sense. It took me back to the only two days I have ever spent in Vienna.

It was winter, so on Day One I visited the Art Museum, spending most of the afternoon with the Spanish Court of Philip IV. The Velasquez portraits take up two rooms: monarchs, queens, princes, infantas. You can sit there for hours until you are, not quite, sitting in Madrid in the 17^th century, with only the soft susurrus of a guard or the Austrian snow outside to remind you that time passes. You have even forgotten about coffee. On Day Two the snow was so heavy that I retreated to a coffee house and witnessed, over the next few hours, what I had always been told. The Viennese have two homes, their apartment and their coffee house. Often their postal address is the coffee house. I set myself up at a side table and, being the pre-email pre-iphone era, started writing letters. I wrote all afternoon. Snow kept falling outside, heavier and heavier. I could have been in a Wallace Stevens poem. Then the locals wandered in and started doing the same thing, sitting at tables, playing chess, writing letters, ordering beers. They all had their own tables and were unlikely to depart anytime soon. Time went on like we were at the Spanish Court of Philip IV and Diego Velasquez needed just a little more space to consider his next touches.

Two thoughts came into my mind: these Viennese all have kitchen tables at home and it is a long time before Melbourne will ever learn the ways of Vienna. For example, although we may sit in the gutter gazing at the stars, if we’re not careful the waiter will whisk away our half-finished macchiato, or stand ominously close with the unsaid wish that we vacate our table now for new patrons. Far better is that long Sunday afternoon with friends and family, where a fresh plunger arrives after the meal and we can reminisce about amazing rooms we have seen in Europe, or ponder how the stern manners of our great-aunts are now the subject of lovable anecdotes.

Older

Older

Trees older than streams they grow in, leaves sunstruck

The day we walk up Sheoak River, butterflies orange older

Than the tracks they caper over. Stones older than firs

Came here somehow a seedcone on a ship older waves

Bow sprayed cabin boomed. Sticks older than snakes

Up in the cool, we find waterfalls older cliffs expose

Gape into space, froth older than blood around pools,

Storm blown eucalypts older than leaf-turn cocoons

Summer schools the quickest way. Skinks slim, older

Than a word for them, fishbone fern older than bramble

Blackberries. Boulders headhigh older than glass, canvas,

Toppled into stepping stones blooms of volcanic grey, older

Than the windstreaming trees, older than anthills and their

Perfect warm moment, older than tourists in suncream.

Philip Harvey

Twinkle

Twinkle

Up above the world so high

Shuttles satellites lunar cars,

How I wonder what you are.

July a skylab has a great fall

Shatters to dust from fire rain,

No one can put it together again.

Old cold warriors jump over the moon,

The space dish runs away with the spooks

and the little dog laughs at the milky way.

A is our utter amazement

Z for our zero tolerance

here left of centre of the universe

While we rehearse the universe

Godzone until we are fit to burst

With our latest quantum firsts.

The clock strikes one.

The past is young as the sight

from the garden seat of the little lights;

It makes no difference who you are

awake asleep your house is googled

When you wish upon a star.

Philip Harvey

Preface

Preface

And what is a preface? A praytense, a protext?

Let me write you one preambling in fashion of the dane

Mistier Churchfarm with his obleak cane and stove hatts.

He sad, “It’s a mood, like schapening a skythe

Tyouning a guitar, chartting with a child,

Sputing out the window. Like bowing to dance

Then not moving. Tugging the horse, how it goes prrooff.

Not caring a fick for the hurl whirled. Like standing

On evasive hill stairing after the wild geests,

Seeing the forus track seaductiff dizzypeer…”

Or his anonyme said so and then who would say 

It is a pinch of scribble

For what follows allshow is no first face:

Thousends off pages of his walking words,

Mattered life meets mute death and veerily

Young Sorrowhen means it.

 Preface, by Philip Harvey
from Wake Up

Forfatterskab

Danish: pen name, heteronym

Should I, the onely lone of many, talk volumely

as if my life dependulumed upon donnish pastries,

words so cruden direact like a lent sermon?

Or am I in direlock with the many in one I transport

through rained-on streets toward the soulitairy coup of coffee?

Where I can be Cats Pyjamas to argue for sleeping life offt,

Anti-Metropolis aghahnst the baloof that dreams are our dearth,

Graffiti Head self-commissionarating the collected sprayings.

At times it is He Heeded who becomes my most ornate passage,

honest as the long is day, as though in this very farisee

He is my better half and everything other leave it out:

asks, have I changed my life, have I changed yet?

Life is living, aspired a spare it wholly averse to doctorin,

says He in bemeantime impersonaely, to me. Right it!

Then in my empty square under soakra trees a new voice

prays for attendsum, this time as if I knew nothing,

my schooling a skite to impress the geograhistarithmetician

I later learnit want home each night to feed his mutter.

And this could be the noisery, one with blocks and rocking horse

watching adults play at their crosis of converse and inverse;

adolts, like murther dear and fader face

togather twins in my glass of for-die odd years,

quarantime enough for these mine wrung selves.

I had no idea it was he who spoke for you

nor that we are the sum total they have claim to of me

and it was when you and they were we.

Only let me communigate this guilt trip to West Jutland,

be it tongues of mean and angles as allowed, almost

requested. Forgive may! But for the motive, can any author

explain the order, the final product complete defiled,

placed under clusterfication gnombers in liberies.

Inkjet print upon rustling surfaces rust into trust.

Lead pencil cursives up on the line, down into a corner:

the anno tatians sprouting daisy-like from word gardens.

And in a hundread years will one person, upon this,

follow his gaze beyond mine taxt and into my names.

Shall any name like be unto no other?

Or are all numens one numb in the cartalog,

where it martyrs not who is puritan and who catholic,

ranging as they do their fine-all phrases into deity,

breath real for them alive as the reader of these lines?

Where our simple sounds rest strewn and holey,

meaning and mimicryonix permanently pitched,

sighns in the wait for age of an ancient dictionhoary.

Forfatterskab, by Philip Harvey

from Wake Up

Sing

Vernal