Sunday 28 October 2012

Mons



SNOW

SNOW MONS SNOW

SNOW MONS MONS SNOW

SNOW MONS MONS MONS SNOW

SNOW MONS MONS MONS MONS SNOW

SNOW MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS SNOW

SNOW MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS SNOW

SNOW MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS SNOW

SNOW MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS SNOW

SNOW MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS SNOW

SNOW MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS MONS SNOW


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

Sunday 14 October 2012

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.

Saturday 6 October 2012

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.

Friday 5 October 2012

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 20th 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 17th 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


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