Serpent (September)

The serpent has a human face. Wrought with wrath or fretted with fear. Glaring with envy or arched with pride. The artist knows the subtle change. Pouts it in paint or inscribes on stone. Not like them, the woman and man. Their faces are fresh, their bodies are warm. They know a good thing when they see it. Their flesh is gorgeous and their posture upright. The fruit does their heads in. Gorgeous uprightness becomes apparent. Apparent requires figgy apparel. Death is a word in the dictionary. Timelessness turns into September. Their faces become like the face of the serpent.

Supernatural (September)

Tonight, in the general vicinity, supernatural silence has ‘descended’. All afternoon, when one went out to peg clothes on the line, or some such, beery roars came from neighbouring backyards as more goals were posted, thrilled possibility around the outdoor BBQ TV that Collingwood will cause the upset of the century. Two frigging points. Why not one point, just to make the message even harder? Tonight, in supernatural late September silence, I go down to vicinity station to welcome home Carol and Bridie from their Sydney-Melbourne train trip. Huddles of forlorn supporters, b&w scarves banners, trudge home disconsolate, to bed. 

Smoke (September)

Listening to a parishioner, or at his September desk with pastoral lists (Ah! Spring!), whooping it up half-time at a symphony, he’d be smoking. After, he went out to visit the sick. We could visit the sanctum sanctorum. Erinmore Mixture in yellow tins, Peterson pipes in a rack, everything kept in order for slow intakes. Smell of childhood, curtains filled with fumes. Eugene Peterson’s The Message is not the world’s greatest Bible translation. Taking liberties is the modus operandi. His ‘Vanity' in Vanity of Vanities and All is Vanity is ‘Smoke'. Withdrawn to his study, he packed a fresh pipe.

Saxophone (September)

Now our twenties talk, where we were going and returning names passed on, their unseen outcomes, are steps up the scale we hear as they’re sounded on the saxophone. And clichés a dime a dozen swim into ballads that September kept hidden until now of a value beyond diamonds and originality, likewise, more so only we can conjure quite like this, how it fills the room or drifts from a street corner on the saxophone. And idiosyncrasies of loved ones are keytouches, their characterful travels challenges pratfalls time will tell or heal or flower forth during brackets from the saxophone.

Swift (September)

Swift’s a voracious reader. Has access to big libraries. He targets hyper-rationalism, the tone of science. Swift doesn’t declare himself ironic. It’s not just satire, but pessimism. Things cannot be immediately improved. People shuffle and want to cut him off. He is anonymous. Someone rational proposing something unmoored. Swift gets on the news next day. Swift hates Ireland and defends Ireland. He lost on the South Sea Bubble. He mocks and scorns.  Exposes the gap between what people say and what they do. At strategic moments, the mask slips. Swift lives till 78. [Ronan McDonald lecture notes, 26 September 2018]

Saturn (September)

Its relative proximity and infinite remoteness. Its iron storms and electric clouds. Its internal seas and crystal atmosphere. Its sunless disposition and gigantic fact. Its uninhabitable pressure and slow vertigo. Its colossal rotation and exorbitant orbit. Its monster hydrogen and metallic bend. Its lavender laterals and pink drinks. Its great spots and small. Its rings and things. Its serial moonlets and sixty-two moons. Its frozen moons and helium moons. Its sweeping conclusions and unanswerable silences. Its imaginary May and fictional September. Its powder ice and instant consumptions. Its braiding asteroids and cumulus ammonia. Its daytrip diamonds and invisible night time.   

Southland (September)

Its stainless boutiques and sporty bazaars. Its Taylor Swift corridors and tireless escalators. Its complacent capitalism and top-heavy security. Its complicit brand names and rubbish car parks. Its bothered shoppers and homeless residents. Its framed McCubbins and half-price Condors. It’s escapist air-conditioning and its cologne. Its stackers and checkouts. Its flocks of iPhoners and vacant vapers. Its cellophaned orchids and pre-packaged cacti. Its marble floor plan and stretched skylights. Its grocery valleys and trolley mountains. Its sudden coffees and decorative doughnuts. Its jaded January and surreal September. Its fraught pharmacies and two dollar emporia. Its distant exits and practical chairs.

Sydney (September)

Its stubborn conservatism and riptide radicalism. Its crooked streets and meandering freeways. Its dogged teetotalism and regardless alcoholism. Its sparkling water and dark past. Its greedy bankers and lonely accountants. Its lavender Whiteleys and pink Olleys. Its humidity and its busters. Its runaways and stay-at-homes. Its fractured iPhones and trash e-books. Its gargantuan fig-trees and impeccable frangipanis. Its cappuccino sandstone and cocoa brickwork. Its weekday crowds and rococo buskers. Its shrill endeavours and brash announcements. Its melancholy May and brilliant September. Its power shoulders and instant costumes. Its limitless liners and daywear dinghies. Its smelly bus stops and flotsam quays.

Sequel (September)

Mr C.L. Dodgson was a mathematician, known today for the Dodgson Condensation, the method of computing the determinants of square matrices. Our late Sovereign Lady, Victoria, by the Grace of God, Queen Empress, of happy memory, was much taken by his ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland' and ‘Through the Looking Glass’. Her Majesty most graciously made it known she would suffer Mr Dodgson’s next work to be dedicated to Her Majesty. Mr Dodgson, inventor of the Red Queen, was literal as October follows September. His next work was dedicated to his Sovereign Lady. It was entitled ’An Elementary Treatise on Determinants'.

Sealer (September)

Collingwood divides followers of the game down the middle. You love them or you hate them. As a Magpies barracker my whole life, I've watched this divide with permanent amusement. The Coodabeen Champions once made two lists of football truths, 'Good for Football' and 'Bad for Football'. At the head of each list was the one word: Collingwood. On the last Saturday in September there is a moment, normally sometime in the Last Quarter, when one team kicks the sealer. I have only witnessed this twice in my life with Collingwood, but it’s the unforgettable moment of the entire spectacle.

Superfluous (September)

So much that is superfluous. News, opinions, demands. How to reduce superfluous, how to save time. As though reduction results in declutter, unclutter, simplicity. All that time spent deleting superfluous. So much time! Superfluous to requirements, in the circumstances superfluous and extraneous. How anything not meeting desire, anyone extra to expectations, extra to the time expended, is superfluous. Not superlative, but supernumerary. September already? Where’s the year go? Imagine then having nothing at all. Super flumina Babylonis. Even the most superfluous gift is sufficient. Food is enough for survival. A kindness is solace. Someone speaks your name, like a song.

Substance (September)

Our substance is two yards of energy and entropy. We dwell within, somewhere between empathy and closure. We came from the sea, water predominates predates us, substance formed from near-formlessness. In every gesture we hand back the generations, hand them on. September in the south rouses our substance anew, sunlight in the blood stream, cool thrills of fluid active minds, food enough. Why fill ourselves with substance that kills, only yes some of us do. Liquor breaks the storied delicacy we own once. Opium sends us mad asleep and Ice would kick down doors to be not-Ice again, born free.

Satsuma (September)

Weed-surrounded round trunk fortifies into urine-trickled rain-watered black soil now fifteen years, its bark a tribulation of Viennese cross-hatching, scarred and come summer ant-trailled. Seven or so branches river-bow above, grey fabric dark around polls and branch snaps, pruned into places no human goes but bees reach in changeable September sunshine. Shoots of green tip the long whips, their brown flex almost burgundy, determined to repeat the quiet outreach of unspoken millennia, tail-waving in minimal breeze. White five-petalled blossoms trick out in twos and threes, at intervals, their golden starburst pollen parading in the air for fruit and night possums.