Blackout (September)

September the light will not turn on. It cannot, in the dark. That’s odd. You feel your way by bed and doorframe, couch and switch that will not light, to the 3am widdle. All of Wye River is darkness. Even the light of the boat at the starless horizon has gone. Sound of your water on water assures you have found the middle. Lampposts are out. Hills are black as before settlement and sea sounds in the dark. Generators? Lightning? At breakfast Carol says it was like the old days, when you couldn’t see your hand in front of you.

Green (September)

September everywhere green, similar to moods. Ocean water for miles through winding trees below the road past Lorne. Or the dark green firs of Queenscliff, staying dark even when sun comes out. Tired green alongside the Geelong road, or is it just we who are tired? Up in Melbourne, hillsides of silver green and serried green exchange bristling antics with the wind. A shower drifts across a rainbow above the valley. Freeways guide the drivers’ side vision with solemn sheoaks. Broad and shiny are camellias in Rosanna. Home is where the trees fill raindrops on windowpanes with newly leafing maples.

Frail (September)

September appears robust enough, dealing with any eventuality, its frail role in eternity rarely mentioned. The robust world continues, regardless of its frail sources of life, air, earth and water. War and such rumours block the view, unimaginable, cruel, and final. What is our frailty, then? Dying, the old woman chastises nurses: “Don’t call me frail!” Those around her move robustly, fixing beds and medicines. At the funeral our strength is taken up with frail: frail liturgies of committal, frail eulogies of shared lifetimes’ robustness. Everyone is so well-dressed. The church is relatively old. Tapers burn down their frail wax.

Erosion (September)

September shines on the work of Men. The engineering feat that lifted Depression is prone to mishap. The Great Ocean Road will lose its outline. ‘Slow’ signs and stop lights emerge past turns, where mishaps are happened upon. Madame performs a halt in her shiny new machine. Cliff fell even unto the guard rails. Fire-razed bracken slopes refuse to reforest. Their slump of earth obliterates macadam, adds new points to the coastline of Australia. Rocks bumble and bounce in freefall bowling. Unwearied, workmen affix geo-vert eco-mat and hexagon wire mesh to ungrassing sludge. Mend clifftops within an inch of lives.

Beach (September)

September stares towards Antarctica: ice shelf breaks, volcano discoveries, sea rises. What is black humour, anyway? Banned from in-flight movies, a staple of Dodgy Alley theatre. Waves lather the beach. Surfers stare from their car-wheels at the chaos of reef: nothing today. Erosion walls relocate towards the caravan park. Affronting the surf live saving club, sandbags hold against tides. Wye River abandons its serpentine exit, cuts to sea the shortest way. Winter and old fires let landslides loose into seaslides. Lapwings swoop the comedians who wander thoughtless across nesting grounds. Waves cover sand repeatedly, like every film you’ve ever seen.

Parrot (September)

September descends to the decking. Alisterus scapularis doesn’t give a whistle for Latin, a carrak-carrak for name-calling. Humans are where they can raid fruit, whisk off with seed as they please. Humans sit over steaming teacups arguing colour. Daughter says King Parrots are red, Father orange, the bird book scarlet. Mother eye-rolls. They gather in small flocks, like the tea-drinkers. They hang about in flowering gumtrees, so their bodies are green leaves and their heads are gum flowers, red, orange, and scarlet. Their crescents and stripes of green help them disappear. Humans plan outings, tea turns lukewarm, parrots turn tail.

Wattlebird (September)

September pollinates business-like, post-bushfire. Morning above the big ocean wattlebirds arrive in the banksias. One pendulums on topmost, finding its beak in every nook and bristle of a wiry cone. Wind helps the effect. Bird picks and chooses each flower in loopy fashion, leaping about towers of branches. Upsidedown the other threads fibres, shifts sideways lithe grey, an acrobat about the sun. Artists have the devil of a time perfecting evolution’s simple balancing act, plodding watercolour and words. Already morning fills with sounds of ocean and greatest hits radio at a new construction site and the cackles of departing wattlebirds.

Monosyllable (September)

September is not altogether an English gentleman. “The more monosyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seeme, and the lesse you shall smell of the Inkhorne,” extols Gascoigne (1575). Berryman thinks Shakespeare “very fond of monosyllables,” that “about one-tenth” of lines in the sonnets are entirely monosyllabic, a cause for “the poet’s blunt force.” We were taught the same at the polysyllabic university, by inkhorn academics whose jargon could outmanoeuvre entire oeuvres. We smiled at Rabelais’ monks conversing in one-word dialogues, obedient to Our Lord’s command to say just yes or no. Shakespeare worked with whatever words worked.