Façade (December)

December wants it both ways, without question. Façadebook heaps up author dialogues, thrown sideways by another celebrity death. Who are we? Hipsters with Edward Lear face-fungus talk like computer upgrades. What’s he mean? Barak features stare down ragtag Swanston Street torn up for future metros. What next? Teens sound behind fly-eye sunglasses wear T-shirts ‘Established 1853’. Why not? Heritage overlay turns post-Moomba festivals a darker shade of brown. Herald-Sun glass block façade admits a stingy ray of sunlight struggling feebly down. Tramways pass lovely frontages of gardenless renovations, marble fountains and BBQs to the back lane. What have we lost?

Bin (December)

December notes Tuesday night’s wheelie bins’ overcontented contents. Recycled only, yellow lid: broken crackers, wrapping paper, pretzel boxes, Advent calendar, shopping lists, misdirected cards, outdated diary, stocktake flyers, festive envelopes, electronic packaging, egg containers, party hats, shot champagne, empty Coonawarra, dead marines, fizzy non-returnables, sayonara Schweppervescence. General waste, darkgreen lid: turkey detritus, crumpled ribbon, yoghurt buckets, cheese gauze, sauce sachets, chocolate wrappers, icecream buckets, icecream bouquets, DVD sealwrap, Santa sock, voucher tins, tealight cups, bung lightbulbs, Scotch dispensers, nauseous napkins, frazzled frills, busted baubles. Green waste, lightgreen lid: pine needles, walnut shells, lemon rinds, coriander stems, humpty dumpties, tired flowers.

Downpipes (December)

December is a furnace when drops fall on sidepath leaf-scattered concrete and thuds sound on wattle-tousled wavy laserlite and wind lifts leafy overhead giants and buckets fill with speckling trickling increase and gutters overflow rapid water strings and porches turn awash with whitest rain and thunder heavies over high hill Bundoora and downpipes burst fountains upward collision and gardens grow into untended water-raging pools and the Crescent is a speeding creekbed and storm tests root structure of great trees and deluge is roaring mountain cloud sound and water breaks through huddled shed’s weak points and unexpected inundations magnify underlays and…

Refrigerator (December)

December gravitates towards the refrigerator. Swivel-head bottle of water relieves the reddened gardener. Chilled are the Christmas chocolates that melted into gargoyles. Cold beer cheers lunchtimes of tuna sandwiches and tomato salad. The fridge door stands open with blessing. There’s nothing to do in the heat. Cats are barometers. Outside, ants may have taken over the world. Has anyone checked? Cool things, we brought them down from the jungle of supermarkets. Our credit cards last a lifetime. Now we mill delighted at the refrigerator, the sweat of our brow cooling in ice-air. We incline toward siesta on a couch somewhere.  

Verandah (December)

December declares the year’s best reads. *‘Convenient Truth’ (DroneClone) is a timely meditation on how politics makes up the science it prefers. Why worry about the sky falling when you have your own verandah? asked the Environment Minister this year. Naomi Klein rebuts all such facetious rhetoric. *‘Veranda or Verandah?’ (Picador) asks Julian Barnes in essays about the places we do our reading. Audrey Hepburn read by moonlight, Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Barnes arranges his home with as many ‘brown studies’ as possible. *‘Tiffin’ (Viking Penguin) is Vikram Seth’s surprise crime outing, all set on one verandah, one afternoon.

Decking (December)

December equals firetails scouting for seed while sun blazes sea. Shellgrit speckled hardwood table of early morning coffee thoughts. Red-stemmed mint, white-stemmed rosemary, translucent-stemmed basil, primrose-stemmed oregano grow flavours. Watering-can stands at attention, never knowing the day or hour. Automatic fairy lights glint in the real solar 7.30am oversupplies. Black shadow wetsuits rest over deckchairs waiting for life to resume. Spiders’ secret work through banksias is dozens of sunlight lines. Beach stones ages smooth stay put in their adolescent pattern. Last night’s wine bottle stands still while its quaffers sleep-in. Some flies and a dignified currawong inspect the leftovers plate.

Footbridge (December)

December bulrushes crowd the banks out into water. Yellow sand glows under the stream. Not like December last, when Wye River stopped in the beach and the hillsides crackled dry. It was stationary, one kind of hot day after another, a hint of smoke that eventually meant business. Now everywhere there are workmen, laying tar, felling timber. We share the footbridge, quiet as it ever gets here at Christmas. Quiet as anyone wants it, trade is slow. Even the surfers’ numbers are low and there’s little fishing off the railing. Herons drift down over the blackberries. Kookaburras watch for action.

Carpark (December)

December parks its machine all day where crumpled banksia cones parallel stranded kelp. The surfboards arrive on chunky vehicles. Occupants change into wetsuits on warm roadway. Chinese in Brits vans sail past the line-up. A butterfly bobs across. Families in sensible cottons and cabbage hats find ti-tree shade for their town car. Campervans in mock-hippie obey parking restrictions. Surf haze and cicada phrases drift over the sunglass set, looking for lunch. Workmen down from fire-affected areas park where “that’s good enough.” Picnickers unpack the boot, slap on, but the heat may be unkind. By evening they’ll all be someplace else.

Carport (December)

December tarpaulins slip off the unused furniture, objects from another time, other lives. Leaf litter thickens against sidewall, damp-coloured wind-dried. Bench upholds half-full tins of the Dulux of yesteryear. Fishing rods, clippers, brooms and brushes lie where they landed. Dust of gumtree grit and crushed leaf sands the concrete floor. Folding chair against folding ladder await further instruction. A new roof keeps the sea rain moving all year. Rocks unrusted serve as retaining wall for The Vehicle. Secreted away until Christmas, a deck-umbrella rests folded and hooded. It’s a bare lightbulb colours their forms when dusk is done and dusted.

Undercroft (December)

December ups the heat. Under the house is not much cooler, the wrens keep clear of stacked-up surfboards, water pumps, nets, broken dressers of hardware. Blue glaze outside, under here is shadow dust. The curious case of holidays: still finding something to do for an hour. Croft of tins, wire, yes garden tools, one of those places visited once a year, maybe, yet familiar as the back of my hand. Time for turning over planters for new herbs, rivet them in fertile mix before the cool change. I wish for a rainstorm by afternoon, something oceanic and electrical, then drenching.

Steps (December)

December, both spring and summer, is a majestic storm cloud at daybreak. Waves make steps of water. Watch sea, dark beneath the walls of water floating heavily towards Wye River! Wye’s hills are everywhere steps after bushfire repair. Time to sleep-in, set the clock by it, time for more safe dreams: steps taken unexpectedly turn erotic and gold-rose. Waking for breakfast the sun dazzles, dazes. It’s still dry outside. Watch wrens land and turn upon the stone step boulders! The storm has moved inland, stepped above the forests where mileage is meaningless. Imagination must accommodate start-up of the day’s machinery.

Shallows (December)

December walks towards the horizon until it drowns. Staying in the surf makes more sense. Continents of foam arise arrange behind a wave to be erased by the next. They stretch into clouds, swept away by unravelling wave. Deeper out, surfers split the difference between air and sand, suited for their element. Bathers feel cold heebie-jeebies till the full weight hits. Immersed, they ply the even up-and-down where moon has gone before. They face-plant the next lift of white water, or boogie across scud of thin flood, or jump, or dump. Hours, please, continue where there’s no thought of tomorrow. 

Rockfall (December)

December presents the ancient assembly, brought down by diggers’ explosion, earth skin erosion: a resting place. Honeycomb stone fizzes with surf froth then releases, awkward blocks and orbs of brown. Black tables of rock, scarred from old shells, are locked into sand to the midriff. Volcanic marbles brought by fire from hinterland seas of magma, live out old age awash with spray and rainbow inklings. Geometric jokes of feel-good boulders rest inside one another’s joins, each shift of shadow providing forms unavailable in a dictionary. Lines of perfect grey, better than enamel, trace where lava must have cooled once upon. 

 

Nearby reef at Wye River. Photograph by B. Harvey.

Garden (December)

December has cleared the burnt trees. Its air is clean where new shoots, blue-like ascendancies, shove toward the sun. Everything new reminds us of fire – hip-high grasses, effortful canopies, the scorched trunks themselves – as we sit in the valley view of the back garden. Hilltop forest stands toward Kennett River remain brown as winter. The mechanics of restoration thrum, yell and clank, stop for lunch. Behind every colour is red, the bark that contains the red wood within, earth separated from seedhead. Reverse beep-beeps sound ordinary beside firetail manias. An echidna emerges from the bracken and ambles under the clothesline.

Photograph of echidna at Wye River: B. Harvey

Beach (December)

December collects all signs we are here to see. Names and lovehearts gouged in sand, erased by tide. Crinkled kelp blacks tawny sky-mirrors. Log burnt by bonfire or bushfire stands foursquare in the wind. Clusters of twig, bark, feather, glass and shell dry against embankments, their sources lost over months. Dog paws toe, flip-flops flatten, seagulls starprint, hands nought-and-cross with sticks the perfect wet surface semi-sheened with sun. Tiny limpets unstuck from reef dot the undulations, soon to do back the way they came, by racing froth. Old stone bowls attached to platforms offer up salt when the surf’s in.

Mall (December)

December gazes at the dove-grey deco front of Myers. Faces search for their next purchase, weighed down already with purchases. To avoid cliché of Christmas windows, eyesight seeks a calm place to rest. The beautiful curves of Moreton Bay figs mean little to the queues lining up for snow and jingle bells. Their branches describe ancient fractals, their leaves remember heavy rains, rains before the tree was born.  Higher still, attention is drawn to the slight breeze that, on this hot day, moves the flags ever so on top of Myers. Frayed and faded they haven’t been changed in years.

House (December)

December, when my Jaroslav Seifert opens by chance on “only the river doesn’t age.” People we never saw sell their houses in the neighbourhood. Suppose they went to live in care, let’s suppose. Timber structures and cream brick foundations are dismantled in a week. Sentiment is all we see, their lives lived in the sun where “only the river doesn’t age.” Clearance levels their block to a rubble field. Suppose someone died and the family made arrangements, let’s suppose. In a month it will be blocked and babeled in the grand new beige style. Not much garden to speak of.

Lectern (December)

December dreams of a lost lecture. Going to give my lecture I look in my Bauhaus briefcase. It’s not there. Did I forward it in attachment to the host? Back at work the medieval computers open, none with the lecture. The theatre will be filling with people. Did the printout go somewhere obvious? Home is friendlier. The computer comes to life. Friends rummage through Pre-Raphaelite furniture overfilled with papers. It’s passing 12 midday, time for the lecture. My host will be giving an introductory speech. The lecture is nowhere to be seen. It has 23 jokes, one every two minutes.

Nets (December)

December was nets. Every recess the red leather flew from a hand into a bat shiny with linseed oil. Concrete was the hardest wicket on Earth. But the serious imitators of Test excellence practised after school on the ovals. Coaches watched the form as we tossed down a length into soft nets of finest thread. Backwards and forwards of pitch, block, spin, hook, googly, drive all the way to sunset. The great leveller was backyard nets at friends’, makeshift awnings to prevent smashed windows. A four was into the fence on the full, over the fence was six and out. 

Elevator (December)

December cannot contain the bougainvillea. Purple, cerise, plum, there isn’t a word for the colour of bougainvilleas. He wonders if Proust knew about bougainvillea and how Proust would have described its effect on different people in different moods. A new translation of Proust is available and he should really order this set for the summer. Little birds hop on ledges. People walk about happily in cool clothes. Suddenly the mood changes. The mind winces and rages. He remembers Trump. Enough Americans voted to make Trump President-Elect. He thinks, why doesn’t Trump get back into his Manhattan elevator and just disappear?

Classroom (December)

December the results came in. Sparkle of early summer mingled with grades of the year’s subjects, a year’s responses to things half-understood, knowledge recalled willy-nilly or rote. We ran free of results as the beach beckoned. They still come in. We watch our children deal with a pronounced B, teacher’s comments sometimes unhelpfully ambiguous. ‘Co-operative? Usually.’ Or does it ever stop? December, the results of our year still a mixed scorecard. What was that all about? Even at eighty they have the ‘failed the exam’ dream, only notice ‘Room for improvement’, not the A with ‘Excellent’. Glad holidays are here.

Stable (December)

December is when children are born in stables. It’s been going on for centuries. Open the doors of the Nativity scene and there they are, bending forward to reverence the child who needs no sympathy, being equally at home anywhere. (Icons picture them in a cavern, a stone tomb that’s served its purpose.) Shopping malls and freeway medians are stable environments, indeed nowhere is off-limits. Everyone wants The Stable. Outside pony clubs and racecourses, most stables in Melbourne have since been converted into back lane guesthouses for out-of-town visitors and blow-ins. Kataluma, as it says in the Greek, no-strings hospitality.

Bedroom (December)

December falls asleep and is no more December. Inside my placid travel to overturn of dreams, I cannot see the imperturbable surrounds eclipsed by eyelids. Window-frames are hinted at by lamppost light in next street. My thousand bedroom objects of transitory delight may as well sleep another sleep. Goodnight. Rooftops and jacarandas keep to their regime. A feral, or a possum, bumps empty flowerpots on the moon-clouded side of the house. Spiders star-jump their threadbare links. Sound that could be a plane or music temporarily drifts over the old subdivisions. Breathing’s closer, calm intake of nostril, mouth, and matrix skin.

Polytunnel (December)

December draws out tomato flowers. Russian kale unfurls, corn waits to spiral. Parsley’s going to seed, mint multiplies. As day turns to dusk, the Community Gardeners settle into festivities in the polytunnel. Big salads in bowls, gladwrap rolled back, trays of snaggers off the BBQ. Beer uncapped, or pinot sipped from kitchen mugs. Everyone’s at home, surrounded by stands of cucumber seedlings, pumpkin sprouts. Conversation is where we came from, how our garden grows, what we’ve won in raffles. A Christmas tree glints and decorations hang about inside our polytunnel inside the Gardens inside Macleod inside Melbourne inside The World.

Caravan (December)

Caravan (December)

December’s coach of warm daydreams moistens fluid again so they wrinkle, and make their thudding muchness into the aisle whose dry cross’s gone into the great flux of mushroom white that transform slabs and stone wallow. So thick a mortal it draws beforesaids from its box, so they go a controlled tool pouring upwards to the next stone fitting: a rainbow for mode and brief annals. The two caravans at angularity, ticking, are just off for the midsummer leaving behind us these green crests… down through their bolts. Spatterings hissing up as if on vents, plumes reaping the midland references. 

caravan 1

caravan 2