Certain (June)

It must have been about June 1975 that I was quoted to by a friend from W.H. Auden’s ‘A Certain World’. Quotes were doing the rounds of the university college where the literature students, a minority in that setting, temporarily led a life they once imagined. The real world might be Law and Medicine, it was also Reading and Writing. The pun speaks of a circumscribed world and a definite world, a known world and a particular world, a reliable world and an assured world.  We undergraduates found the title corny, but the pun speaks of each person’s individual condition.      

Also here: https://clippingandcoining.blogspot.com/search/label/W.%20H.%20Auden

Map (June)

This map of myriad marks, unfolding pages over a lifetime, when spread out, how to read it? Will it get to the heart of it, flesh out the life that gave it shape? A sentence hangs over me daily, fully formed, or invisible until prompted. I set it out, then another, into contours I can scarcely explain myself, sometimes. These maps of words record features navigators alter with time. Promontory of Youth is renamed Narcissus Point. Desert of Emptiness is recharted Godzone. Seas of Adventure appear the same as Eros Ocean. Strange Shore becomes Friendly Islands; Guilt Trip, Strait Gate.

Dumps (June)

In the dumps, an idiom for the blues, extends to collective sense of despondency, unhappiness tending towards despair. It’s not despair, only a group sense of loss dictated by mood and circumstance. Dumps is a plural noun for rundown dwellings, neglected premises. For those on the street, this may be a packing case under the Brooklyn Bridge. In June it is shade, in January you could die in the snow. The verb explains this state of affairs. People dump on other people. People dump other people. They send them to a dump site, believing they’ve solved things. People dump responsibility. 

Drone (June)

Shoegaze was a rock form. Guitarists with lank hair produced drone for hours. It was the drone of engines, the unquestioned moan groan of freeways. Abbottabad woke to helicopters in the night. Locals thought, oh just another drone. They’re endless. Until whatever happened finished off Osama Bin Liner. This June the Prime Minister and his phone friends at the Drones Club ordered (loaned?) six surveillance objects at cool billions, so they can spy on cool billions. It never ends. Drones, over every air space, film before, during and after, as the whole world’s locals submit unwillingly to constant low-level intrusion.

Possum (June)

Playing possum means pretending you’re dead, useful knowledge when reading Eliot. Rousing the possum is its opposite, Australian for livening things up, creating controversy. This June Saturday, my midwinter visit to the barber, provides other possibilities for ‘possum’. The haircut in the chair expounds: “So she says, my neighbour, can you do something about your possums? MY POSSUMS! She says, those possums come over from your fruit trees. You need to get rid of them. So I say, they live in your roof. They’re not my possums. She says ‘your possums’! They’re her possums.” Possums themselves elude this anthropomorphic roundabout.  

Star (June)

I remember Clayton, where respect for the welfare of cars took precedence over that of humans. It seemed to be the American way. Conversations were three storeys high and stretched both ways to the horizon. Perspectives changed colour every ten seconds, becoming more interesting with the sound off. Stars got in the way of the stars, their brief lives made briefer when we fell asleep. Making love involved voluntaries of random randy car horns. Going home was considerably more realistic, rows of street lights and a stationary moon. A university was being built from the ground up, ready some June.

Football (June)

I remember Collingwood, decked out Magpies queueing at ticket boxes, joking tactics, savouring the pie-sweet air. First thrill of the green zone as we mounted the ramp, and blue sky, the players circling their positions, muscles gleaming from the rooms, handsome in their distance, leading for a pass, stacks-on-the-mill. The wooden members’ stand was a tangle of streamers, a lungful of belief. Ted Potter was all style, Mick Bone looked ready to kill, even in June our place in the four secure. Fans standing on cans they had consumed yelled the louder over the partisan crowd: “Get some glasses, u-m-p-i-r-e!” 

Diary (June)

I remember Brunswick and the nights of Rage, its anodyne heavy metal, its floral new wave. The days of walking the neighbour’s dog turned into nights of analysing who dobbed in their marijuana crop. The days of Victoria Market on the No. 19 tram turned into nights of  hunza pie, No. 1 homemade tomato relish. The days of outings to the Hills or the Bay turned into night outings of true confessions behind closed doors. The days of Helen Garner on death turned into the nights of Seamus Heaney on life. The days of June turned into the longest nights.