Pruner (November)

Garden Notes. Saturday 26^th November 2016. Crush eggshells in the basil pots to deter snails. Find dead rat under ferns behind water tank, its belly alive with maggots: cat Obsidian’s work. Cut 150 cm lengths of branch for Banyule green waste bundle collection this Wednesday: four kinds of pruner, the long-arm cutter, secateurs, saw, and bare hands. Collect jacaranda seedpods from paths for propagation: first blue flowers appear. Snip pinot-coloured suckers from climbing roses. Transfer succulents into sun-and-shade positions, after weeding the rainy weather weeds. Clear gutters. Witness Eastern rosellas in the ramshackle wattle: rare sight in this hillside garden.

Biro (November)

Are we that person? Someone else defined? That caricature of name and job and belief and vote and relations? That set of identifiers serving soon as typecast? That person they box in and write off? Or are we what typecast only hints at? Not submissive to role, open to change, someone just trying to sort it all out? Are we not, this November morning in this irresistible place, this free-moving being overflowing with memories, tested with desires? Do we not, some of us, scribble something down like this, with our implacable biro, just to get ‘typecasted’ out of our system?

Cigarette (November)

Singly, or together, they sit against the wall behind the restaurant, iphone in one hand, cigarette in the other. In city back lanes, by side doors in Chinatown, cooks measure the hours of their day with smokos. The art of cuisine has been obscured now they are factors in the ‘hospitality industry’. Tobacco and the aroma of cigarette smoke have their own distinctive pungencies for those who can identify by smell herbs and spices with their eyes closed. Springtime appetites must be met. Outside in soothing November air the white-vested cooks take ten minutes before returning to one hundred courses.

Mirror (November)

Time has not lessened my disconcertment when a woman sits down opposite in the morning train and starts making her face. Not a yard between us, she lifts the little mirror from her bag and gets to work. There’s something she wipes on her cheek, a brush does cleaning or colouring (how would I know, who turn to watch streets go by?), eyebrows need attention, and there’s the artistry of the lips. Unselfconscious, it’s a regular procedure for her. Job done, she drops the mirror back into the depths, then turns to the same landscape as mine, the same November.

Window (November)

What, asks the poem, do they see in their windows? An impeachable president-elect, assails of emails, tap dance Patience. Tomorrow it will be derelict, already. French’s limited vocabulary relies on feel of accents, moods of vowels. Novembre is not so much November as an emotional theatre of falling leaves and passing houses. What do they see through their window, continues the poem, as the train accelerates? Friends over the water fending earthquakes, their family up to the usual tricks, a colleague with complications. Today is more than their reflection. Words used since schoolchildren start a longing that speaks of home.

Watch (November)

‘The Watch’ tick-tocks in its foreign language, a poem of impervious vocabulary many a translator abandons. “Face-save arm’s-length wrist-slash hand-twist” (line 29) it goes, but this is to be naïvely literal. Natives who know the poem by heart smile ruefully during recitations, punctuating its chorus of alarm bells with laughter. The poem’s manic skeltonic entendres prophesy the timepiece’s evolution, since someone has squashed the universe into there: “digest-touch personal-recall climate-dropdown nation-menu” (line 37). Whatever happened to time, everything is “retrieve-instant november-now” (line 7), regulated empiricism crowning the “pulse-irregular” (line 53). ‘The Watch’ is much anthologised; it’s the President’s favourite poem.

Umbrella (November)

The umbrella is like some poem in another language, a device seemingly inessential to its meaning. It’s teeming across daybreak Melbourne, suburbs of grey rain linked by orange street-lights. Then at line seven the click of the diamond button. The canopy flowers. Or perhaps spreads like a leafing November tree. Or sets into the air like a dome. The verb infers all these possibilities. What the person feels comes late, relationships sorely tested, failure of anyone properly to understand. And thinks: stoicism is all very well but rain is lovely under here. The word for lovely (line nineteen) is untranslatable.