Stain (March)

Stains all over the page. Stains where the work has been. Stains on the windows where something flew. Stains hardened. Stains you try not to think about. Days for cleaning. Days for attention. Days of getting things clean. Stains where tears went. Stains where bandages bled. Stains on shirts. Stains on shoes. Wipe it off with a linen cloth. Wash it clean with sopping tissues. Stains as big as clouds. Stains where you squashed the March fly. Stains the washing in public won’t hide. Stains in the sink. Stains purple as beetroot. Stains grey as rain. Stains peppering the benches.

Camera (March)

Woke to a non-camera area with dreams unsorting from steps. Bathroom, non-camera. Drive to the station, cameras on trees and posts in the air. Train was camera pretty much the whole way. Passing scenery corresponded with photographic memory, even to particulars of reader eye-contact and ticket-machine camera. City, one big camera, more or less. Gentlemen: non-camera when it mattered. Boxes like cameras were bird nests. Carparks, fairly much all camera. March backpackers, happy with camera. Potential crash site was camera-ready. Work, non-camera. Internet, millions of proxy cameras, eye glasses on news surface. Bank equalled camera. Lunch was sandwich and camera.

Rain (March)

Slobbering over rosepetals, the gutter overflow piddles and missiles onto chicken wire too, catching long droplets on hundreds of hexagons. Mazing over treetops, the hilltop downpours collage and switch-swerve over lorikeet lawns too, filtering threaded catchments through thousands of grassblades. Silvering over erosions, the upstream onsets spittle and pimple over mirror water too, lifting moving surfaces above march of freshwater. Pooling over windscreens, the rooftop washdown dribbles and films across shiniest duco too, bearding wet lines along kilometres of macadam. Slooping over crinkle-packets, the township freeze-flow puckers and splesh-splashes over supermarket throwaways too, spreading small billabongs on sheetings of plastic.

Coal (March)

Take into account the warmth it provided in childhood, the time of blackboards and black-and-white television. Blackened hands were brushed clean. Trouble is it cannot do, anymore. We’re not thinking how it ruins upper layers of sky. We’re told often enough. They are so far away, all we know of sky. We suffer enough because we will not understand. We know it must stay in the ground. People don’t stop to reflect. Reflect: March already and the science has been around for years. All this information in our heads, how much of it just burns off uselessly into the atmosphere?

Drops (March)

‘Definitely No Junk Mail’ declares the letterbox. Tidiness and time-saving mix with righteousness. But what of the leaflet walkers, their weekly drops a small extra to shrunken income? The paper has to be recycled anyway. Temperature drops, ten degrees in an hour some days in March. Out without an umbrella, goosebumps on tanned forearms. Bumped his head, went to bed, needed some drops in the morning. Rain, rain, goes away, to where the alps take early snow. White it drops, slow as leaves on random discarded leaflets in tidy suburbs. It’s a cold change, ice in the air, definitely snow.

Jogging (March)

Six on a March morning. Avenues and parks asleep. A streetlight reminds us of colour: red gumtrees, white-yellows of tall grass. Along the beaten track two joggers emerge quietly from darkness and, their brief existence in full view, like figures in a classical story, they return into darkness beyond the precinct of the lamppost. They are jogging the memory. I must keep the blood flowing. I must improve myself. Day is cyclopean appointments, herculean assignments, mercurial errands. Don’t jog me about the deadline! Age pushes their feet forward, casually but insistently. Day jogs their elbow gently and fires up again.

China (March)

Schools have campuses in China: students go on the long march. We drink tea from Wedgwood cups. At our school China did not exist. No one flew there, only diplomats and spies. China was not official, unless it was Taiwan. Cup is replaced in saucer. No one knew if China was the enemy, but raffish boys wore Mao badges, provocatively, little knowing the Cultural Revolution would’ve sent thinking boys into banishment. The Chairman died in the Year of the Dragon, Wedgwood in the Year of the Ox.  We conjecture on the origins of the expression ‘a slow boat to China’.

Sitting (March)

She’s sitting making notes at the seminar, for comfort tucks one foot under her thigh in a half-lotus. She leans forward or sits straight as the evening proceeds, absorbing words. Others arch forward in thought, foreheads a march of ideas. Some slump in habitual L-shaped gloom, await sparkling words to set them straight. Wheelchair occupant keeps her dignity upright. Others sprawl like parliamentarians at all-night sittings, napping or brawling where they sit. Hard-of-hearing is sitting close-to, placid with purpose. The speaker’s not sitting, his subject a palaeontologist mystic who once contemplated how we stood too early, and other evolutionary acts.

Joke (March)

March marches loosely towards April Fools’ Day. Expectancy is about: how to pull the rug from under, how to flesh out the emperor’s new clothes. Comedy Festivals give private parts an airing. Open mike blows the secrets politicians lock in briefcases. Swearwords take on undue emphases, like verbal highlighter pens. It’s said Bergson’s ‘Laughter’ is the unfunniest book ever written. Well, it’s a warning. Analysis on why we laugh isn’t half as funny as laughing. Jokologists should lighten up. March countdown’s more stimulating than a dead-hand explaining deadpan. Their shaggy dogs lack punch-lines. The joke’s on us, that’s for sure.

Leaf (March)

One leaf especially shaped. Eucalyptus long and pendulous to manage the dry. Poplar wavy and yellowing to march the heights. Elm broad and browning to relinquish shade. It’s the travel game of name the tree, known by form and leaf-shape. Maple star-like and reddening to resist extreme. Fig floppy and furrowed to take on water. Peppercorn fishbone and frothy to fill the space. Pine pointed and prolific to recall the forest. Oak frilly and crested to fall in droves. Acacia tapered and spindly to awaken surprise. Liquidambar airy and uncurled to brush your forehead. Not that nature is a supermarket.

Jut (March)

The most recent Jut tribute is at Flinders and Spencer, a tram riveted at 10 degrees perpendicular. It intends a moon launch: Not Taking Passengers. Early Jut is outside the SLV, an angled entablature point. LIBRA in goldleaf adorns this Jut, suggestive of emergence or submergence. Depends if you are an Emerge or Submerge Personality. Triumphant Jut hides Canning Street from the Exhibition Buildings. Its beams stick out of Jeff’s Shed’s eye. Critics likened these Juts to a fascist march salute, a rhetorical attack on the planners’ politics. Actual fascist architecture took two forms: gross neo-classical colonnades and barbed-wire enclosures.

Beanie (March)

Here is the beanie. Humble is the beanie. Even with a pompom stitched to the crown, humble. Knitted in March by grandmother in the club colours, it is elementary. Stripes are the main form, like a brain graph. She’s seen it all before: spirited winters and battles half-won. Thousands worn to the game by believers, like yarmulkes at some secular rite of passage. To belong or not to belong, that seems to be the general gist. To take up a side has meaning, for a season, but such woolly thinking unravels in time. As cheers subside they outgrow the beanie.