Dog (August)

The hunter or the hunted or neither, he appears from the undergrowth, eyes forlorn or storm, stoop speedy then languid; accidents can happen, or not; he has tail in the air ready to rise to an occasion; and four feet tiptoe that leap as one at a flying ball.

Descended from the wolf, she is contour-shaved and curl-primped, parades from carpet to paved patio, but it’s too cold; retreats neatly petitely indoors again for the couch cushions, their embroidered sylvan patterns a reminder of a time she cannot quite summon up.

The calm within the rowdy confines of peakhour carriages is the seeing-eye below the seat of her blind mistress, waiting for the slightest footstep near, movement of walkingstick, or sign of sentience; waiting all well for their stop, their suburb of puddled usual footpaths.

The composer of several hundred symphonies, so many collections of biting thoughts with imprints everywhere, importantly he sniffs around the café chairs for leftover croissant; his head markings like a beret, he wrote the book on canines, answers to Anthropos.

Stretching everywhere on his back, limbs sketching the raw points of a constellation, Blue rolls to a stand, shakes thought back into place, eyes the August blossom, and is free as a bird until thirst starts or food calls or sleep wondrous helper beckons again from the basket.

Why, empathy with owner is contagious, so the dog yawns as owner yawns, smiles if owner smiles, leaps to attention when owner budges an inch; empathy that has them together power-walking swiftly across the park, damp as it is; empathy that only one side tests with a system of charts, or questions.

And when they go away under the table, moan in the corner of moon, get under the feet and under the radar, then instead of that lasting they turn time into fun, of a sudden show up with the lead in their mouth pacing for a run, are out in it where hair waves free in the wind and sun.

Doors (August)

The doors beep stationery and open to the touch, curve-windows and hard jambs, for the shove of workday bodies stepping through, no choice and a little to gain, out of the cold; bodies, all wearing station platform black and rain cloud grey, except for the one woman wearing the red coat.

The doors, down into the earth that for thousands of years was humus of eucalypt and flood dust and fire layers, open onto the basements waiting for infernal release; while doors in the air open and close whole stories of purgatory that parents and schools only hint at, or hope to warn against.

The doors in the air are storey upon storey of how lawyers make or break and doctors defer or decide and sellers take or time-keep and managers mastermind or muddle; open and shut toward vistas, slide and slam before lifts, revolve and retract back into the icy street.

The doors slam shut and we are in the parallel universe of lines and lights and turns, wherein our mobile minds watch the cold outside with indifferent pleasure, coming somewhere or going, yet more artificial as we pick up speed out onto the freeway.

The Doors on the airwaves, the recurring soundtrack recurving of fifty years, is it any wonder everyone had to be a rock star, everyone was, but the sounds fade away as we leave the room because there are more important things to be done with the long dark evenings before spring.

The doors unhinged are turned into art objects, stacked against walls for collection, converted into work benches and homeless cabins, axed for kindling, melted down to make new doors, piled high at tips, refitted for vertical space continuums.

The doors close as close of day closes, relief to close the door on all the petty problems of workplace, or some monumental dispute stupendously silly; or this or that paperwork; close on mistakes until tomorrow; close with the closeness of us together.

Wires (August)

Laid out everlastingly, a good servant and bad master, they bind us whether we will or no with hundreds of cords, whither we go and at murky sunrise the house lights turn on and the street lights off from here to where the salt water begins and never ends.

Such delicate design of gantries and overheads and chains and bolts and crossbars and rods descend to keep trains alive while overhead the haywire of deciduous branches and stems of TV antennae glisten with the remains of wires of rain.

In the cold ground a light year of cables relay unpoetic data faster than we walk; the cold air wets the unending cables taking information over our heads; wind and storms threaten, says the weekend internet.

On freezing stops the prospective passengers take in unstopping music through ipod plugs, wait for the overdue tram, or fingertip polyhedron screens for the latest passive missive via invisible cables and cloudy satellites.

The lies of politicians in the heat of studios in the midst of elections on the pixels of screens at the windows of residences in the square miles of avenues of cities of promises, hang by a thread, barely connected.

There’s a high turnover rate because they treat their staff like crap; can we talk, this situation is right out of hand; come over on the weekend, just you and me; I’ve heard this all before and I tell you it won’t work anymore: on and on on the phone all day and night.

Actors on stage breaking out of Lilliputian ropes, untying the knots with words of wisdom, the trackwork to town they traverse, the microcircuitry of world wide words; untying the tangle actors are bound to through waking hours.

Unit (Zappa)

Moon is a name in many cultures and the moon inspires moon names, but Moon is quite uncommon in the Anglosphere. It is a truth we hold to be self-evident that more Americans name their child Bronwyn than Moon. While the moon is one of the supreme objects of poetic attention and expression, poetry is not the first thing we think of when we meet someone called Moon. Why is that? There is no reason to think Moon unpoetic and with time it comes to have its own grandeur. We would generally expect Moon to be a girl’s name, though there is no argument against calling a boy Moon.

Unit is more unusual than Moon, as a name. When Frank and Gail Zappa named their first child Moon Unit it was at a time when international attention was trained closely on the Apollo Space program. NASA launched a whole range of new terms straight into the language, but undoubtedly one that has stuck is lunar module (LM). A lunar module was the lander part of the moonshot spacecraft, designed to descend to the surface of the moon and, after the spacemen had done their day’s work, ascend again. A unit is a self-contained autonomous body, like many modules, and perhaps Frank and Gail noticed with delight what humans see when their child arrives: the child is a singular individual. Most people would not name their child Unit because, again, it is not common and not to be found in any baby name book. It also has a mathematical or statistical air, counting things out in units. It is impersonal, indeed is a consumer capitalist term denoting mass production and currency exchange, which is not the way humans perceive the uniqueness of their own children. Yet curiously, by calling their daughter Unit they conferred unique status on her anyway. Maybe that was the idea.

The name has all the hallmarks of the age. It is both an expression of hippie freakout and an acknowledgement of the vast American technological advance being felt in 1967. The name is a statement of difference, both bohemian and scientific. Moon Unit reminds us of the Circle and the Square, those two basic shapes of everyday life, of the flat circular vinyl record being placed onto the turntable, and of the square record player unit the turntable revolves on.  There is some crackle from the speaker and then the music begins.   

This is the first of a series of essays on the words of Frank Zappa dedicated to The Hard Listening Group.

Election (August)

The approval given to an individual you have never met, whose actual opinions you only guess at, based on their allegiance to a set of ideas not all of which you agree with, or they don’t agree with altogether, and which could change when they assume power.

The personal consideration of public issues presented as arguments only loosely based on the common good but essential as matters of marketing; consideration of these issues not as they pertain to anyone else, but primarily to one’s own (never let it be said, selfishness) self-interest.

The demonstration of how the leader of a party, his conceits and failings, his values and skills, are immaterial before the overriding contest of two parties vying for the shifting attention of the largest number of possible voters; or her conceits and failings, her values and skills.

The proof that headlines hide the truth, polls are pernicious deceits, columnists have their own agendas, bloggers are witnesses to their own shortcomings, opinion-makers are heated as climate change, and most people have made up their minds before the date is even set.

The lesson in how logic does not determine an outcome, facts don’t get in the way of fictions, equations add up to what people want to see, theories suffer from attention deficit syndrome, numbers in boxes never total one’s true expectations.

The language that key egos preach as humble service; that is a slogan concealing an ugly truth; that could go either way; that was everything shouted from the rooftops and is now next to nothing told in secret.

The Saturday when the whole country goes cheerfully to its fate, waits in line as the ancestors waited in line, expects more of the same prosperity and disillusion; and, whatever the result that night, the Saturday when the power to tax is given over again to politicians.

Sleep (August)

 The world does not hide that the world turns from light to dark and our bodies follow suit, our bodies trained for slow reflexes and a safe harbour to curl in; where there is light the eye opens and as the world turns, shut eye.

Under the influence under the synapses under the fragments of a freeform poem under the skullcap under the wavy hair under the sheet under the two doonas under the cat under the ceiling under the roof under the cold clouds under the arc of the starry sky, drifting off.

Within this timeless place metaphor begins, the analogies that daytime scarce realised, the fullness of perception that explains visions; here the ancient confrontations are comforted, uncomfortable meetings confronted, and in quiet is all untold actions, unwilled.

Sleep is premonitions of death, said the poet at the talking table of the writing workshop who is now dead, though his shades inhabit the pages of his effusive books and his memory arises benignly while awake and elusively asleep.

O experimental radical self-styled innovator of overheated overcooked disconnected rhymeless load, how you do distress yourself out of your own nightmare awake to find you alone in the Augustan Age, your glass of water, the dark silent room and its window onto the rhymed garden and moon of every sequential night.

Some people sleep through anything: thunderstorms, train wrecks, jail breaks, zoo time, wailing blues time, the horn section, security sirens, symphony orchestras, standing ovations, coughing fits, mammoth meteorites, crashing crockery, clanging cutlery, ambulances, fire engines, buzzers, blasts, battalions, even their own funeral.

They were not long for this world who are seizing the day, were fading fast who are waking widely, were nodding off who are ready for anything, were dead to the world who are alive to the moment, were unavailable for comment who are impossible to shut up.    

Yellow (August)

For Miss B.

Rare weekend cars in lamppost-lit side streets and four o’clock insomniacs at their frames of melancholia and the first plane coming home with Europe doing up its seatbelt for landing chance to see, at a minute’s break in dark amorphousness, the thinnest new curve of our single satellite.

The winter must be long and cold, not to mention getting to school or just getting out of bed, and the domestic duties we turn into distractions that must forestall working in the garden, before one morning stepping out and even then it’s late as eight, someone notices the native show its colour spread over every extremity of its being.

Away all day behind a moving mountain of cloud, it suddenly burnishes windows and rooftops, turns freeways into rivers of gold, about three in the afternoon; cold as the suburb may be a glow touches the eye, before new mountains of rain close it down again.

Dandenong Dutch packet bulbs did not budge last year, did not try, that ripple along the edges and waver, bow their bowls and it is the only thing when they come in sight, reminder of an England our ancestors eulogized.

Shutting down the computer and its ten thousand micro-click boxes, its cast of false selfs, a cursor here and a dozen dislikes there, is time to revisit in quiet corridor an image of rest: saint of groundedness, basis of union, it sends where it will the true self.

Head cold and throat rack and sleeplessness send him to the urine-fed tree, to pluck, even in winter, its sunshine shape, its soothing scent, its healthful bitter liquid, its astringent medicine, its vitality to the eye sockets, its straightening of the head.

Under the cone of light it spreads, every imaginable story comes to light, her adventure with dragons and his poem going through purgatory and her browse of the latest papered-over news, when otherwise the room is brown and the passages grey and outside is black as black, without a moon or stars to speak of.

Rain (August)

On the platform where the bitumen dips and pedestrian yellow prickles undulate little puddles widen as their source places expanding circles on the shiny surfaces.

On one side of the carriage the windows are crisscrossed with little sprays while on the other side the windows are speckled with droplets of light and grey, joining and flowing downwards under their combined weight and the speed of the train.

The concert ovations went all night when he emerged from his dreams of long coats and umbrellas anywhere in the world tonight to the warmth of the dark undeniable first world of his enduring habitation.

Overnight the roof sound was steady and this morning already the creek has risen to the grass, breaking banks and collecting more from the skies as it swirls brown toward inevitability.

Wipers in the blaze of white water push clear to serve clarity and every contour directs abundance across the camber and into Hoddle Street storm drains in sprays of hurry.

The slates of Collingwood turn black in the day and warehouse peaks and corrugations and solar panels of Richmond and terracotta tiles of Jolimont and tarmac tops of CBD glisten and whiten and flood.

Little streams down the tram grooves and against window settings and along the centres of leaves in canopy downward are cleaning up their act, the miles of gutters and downpipes, the birds will be happy.

Leaf (August)

 

The silver filigree veins of the brooch on the black lapel of the woollen coat of the woman standing at the red light remind him of satellite photographs of river deltas sparkling in the sun, but they he she they must walk.

The pamphlet for the pancake place handed out by chattery teens all play and watchfulness is scrunched up and scurrying away from the wind tunnel of the law-abiding street named after an obscurely Victorian empire builder.

The little flags that signalled summer and kept their nations alive above the fray are sludge in gutters, losing the forms that are the form of the tree today, the repetitions of those little flags barely a thought beneath the bark.

The portable cladding, layer over layer, seam against seam, rivet beside rivet, ascends each side of the skyscraper, light shifting the shading like a precious jewel, whether in cloud or bleak sunlight, except there seems to be a loose one.

Commuters on the viaduct turn the next page to find she has chosen a new life one she could only have now, while the judge two-dimensional in his one page summation found him guilty as charged, and other stories seen from both sides.

On unseen walls of a side-lane lot in the midst of the commercial towers the infomercial district of the city of closed-off vistas, the broadsheet posters of circus nightclubs and egomania rock bands wrinkle with the rains.

The spreading plane trees outside the casino are bare as their root systems down in the Birrarung earth, yet at the ends of a few east-end branches flutter the last of the big brown signs of life, about to blow into the river at the next insistent breeze.

Tyvek (Sze No. 5)

Sze No. 5

The brickline of fences in Cheltenham, medium and low, then ragged crumble where a vehicle crashed into a letterbox, and it is indeed cold Monday. That was a while ago but this is Monday. The networks of wires above the highway and their random lights are training the eye to rest on clouds of white and rose and lemon. Ragged objects in vacant fields could be papier-mâché. Junked computers on a corner, no one is reading this at the moment. Tickets after the show scurry for the carpark corners. The headache continues and the capsule packet is empty.

The body is carrying a painful argument that it wants to put off then wants to resolve and a little dream of Venice in this cold wind will help. The Venice of pink and white brick walls, sudden stone bridges over canals, motor launches of varnished splendour is in my mind. We could, we could find a little time to step across the white stones, their hand carvings centuries in the making.

But that is hardly going to last. It is the meteorites that we don’t notice in our argument. They are buried in the earth in big round grey shapes to a depth of miles and they hurtle elegantly above the evening clouds like wrapped-up parcels somewhere over near Jupiter. Advertising at railway stations behaves as though nothing will happen like a vast grey ball of stone five hundred miles across crashing into Highett or Hawksburn or does it really matter by that stage. Tyvek is so cute and water can pass right through it.