Table (December)

Photograph of the Mirka Mora exhibition at Heide Gallery taken by Carol O'Connor

It’s a noisy time at Tolarno, the tables discussing the rich tapestry of life, everyone in stitches. Is this an angel at my table, or another politician? December’s mad enough, but new year’s eve? That one with the ‘Q for Quest’ tee-shirt, how did she get in? Probably one of the family. Perhaps Quest is the answer to the question. That dragon on the far table must be one hundred if she’s a day. And that fellow there’s turning into a wine bottle. Bohemia has its limits and they are ragged around the edges. Who is your favourite French poet?    

 

Bird (December)

Photograph of a bird handmade by Mirka Mora, Heide Gallery down the road, 

taken by Carol O'Connor

 
Doubtless we have a bird in the hand, here. But what kind of bird? I sometimes wonder if Mirka ever cared to work from nature, much. Or, just to get the gist. On page 86 of ‘Love and Clutter’ she confesses of a favourite bird book, “it makes me cry. Love is hiding in birds’ names: pratincole, swallow-plover, sea curlew, whimbrel, sandpiper, godwit, tattler, stint, knot, hooded dotterel, and many more.” We get the sense this December exhibit might be one of them and that love is hiding in its name. Her bird is well-fed, unusually feathered, alive with imagination.

Sun (December)

Photograph of cabinet of Mirka Mora graphics at Heide Gallery taken by Carol O'Connor

We cannot hear the sun. It might make us smile to think we cannot hear the sun, but then we can smile because we have an atmosphere. There would be nothing to talk about without an atmosphere. Our clutter of inventions, like kitchen dressers, spiral-bound drawing books, and everything else, would be relic. Our faces turn to the sun, we see every living being play for keeps between too much or too little sun. We taste and see everything the sun makes possible. Come December, a touch of the sun drives us indoors, reading Mirka books by the shuttered window.

Doll (December)

Photograph of Mirka Mora dolls at Heide Gallery taken by Carol O'Connor

Kitchen collisions add to December heat. Florid customers keep a din at the tables, their nerve-wracking gossip upping its pitch. Just over the horizon is Paris, but Melbourne is novels waiting to be written, a way of saying it in x number of languages. Outside, the cool change loosens moods. She lets pandemonium escape back into her sewing basket. Returning home she locks the door behind her into silence again. Time for dolls, flat as a sketchbook, cuter than a kewpie, buxom as a cushion. They populate canvases, turn into cavorting dogs, wordless cherubim. They lean quietly on Mirka’s cookbooks.

Recitation (December)

Instead of famous words coming forth, memorised for this class occasion, nothing. Silence increases at the edge of the platform. The words won’t come. He reaches for a noun or verb to kick-start the famous words, but it’s only expectant faces and clean windows staring back. This exercise is futile, this summary has vanished, this performance is over. The famous words resume their place in the famous book. He resumes his place in the ignominious row. He starts finding his words, where it’s more than December outside and a compliant future. Rather, a future of his words rising to speak.

Titanic (December)

Silently I watch cards. Full house. I am the king of the world. I’m the captain, capsizing a lemon slice into my tea. I lust after Kate Winslet. I never leap from the stern. I hold on. I despise the fiancé, the mother. I jig, I jaunt. I wear the blue diamond. I know what I’m doing. I am the furnace. I am the iceberg, the collision, the what’s-that. I telegraph distress. I play the waltz. I huddle in lifeboats, drown in luxury, die of hypothermia. I’m December’s sunken chandelier, a pair of ragged claws. I cling to some timber.

Age (December)

All ages, in silence we attend the singular event. The baby squalls as normal, kicking up a fuss. His mother tends to the work at hand. Father handles the usual old peace stuff. Middle-aged angels in human form declare the childhood words. Myrrh men arrive with their humble gifts of life and death. It could be any one of us, at a loss for words any time, even this usual old tail end of December, in any age. Us, who chuck wobblies and get it wrong and deal with stuff, our combustible words dissolving into silences flesh wises up to.

Note (December)

Early on this rain certain December morning inside this silence I rest into on the hillside of vacant holiday houses, I ponder the silence in which birdcalls went from ear to fingertip to ink-nib. Alleviating calls of tiny garden birds loop and lift above solemn susurrus of the sea. Honeyeaters, wrens, they make no two notes the same, lilt and drop above water’s surf continuo, long consistent comments all their own. Olivier Messiaen sits on south-facing slopes upon five-lines of continuous transcription, where there is mainly whatever calls he wrote in that moment he wished to quote, then send on.  

 

 

 

Sea (December)

Instead of going down to speak to the sea of all my complaints, I listen for once to the sea. Unwavering lines of thunder and whisper meet the shore in constant address. They are the edge of unspoken depths whose surface sheen is their silent reminder. Rock pools gurgle with December laughter, sloshing with shell and pop-kelp only childhood calls baubles. Perpetual watery wind and windy water powers up then down, louder than any shell to the ear. While further off, icebergs dissolve in cracks. Glaciers speak their last and give up the ghost, tides heightening a whole new language.

Café (December)

All in silence and alone I attend to words around the edges of a city waking in December rain. Raucous soul music in the cafés of Degraves Street. Click and steam of the baristas. A lawyer cutting through the ham and cheese croissant like prize evidence. Splashy umbrellas blue and black do their brack walks towards Collins Street. The man with the stretch cords in his ears yelling at someone in Yarraville. What kinds of words are the words around edges? Any word the language provides, solid, humid as. Rain intensifying on the bluestone pavement. Avocado smashers tapping their phones.

Responsibility (December)

Words inside forced with fury touch the wound, how they come out, how will they? There’s the responsibility of knowing when to speak and when to stay silent. It’s hard to believe disaster would happen now, in December, and so close to Christmas, don’t you agree? Responsibility would hold back words, choosing which words not to say. Would ask who gets hurt, and am I right? Or in silence not keep silence, now anything said is critical, dialing down rather than winding up the situation. Words inside that now emerge, knowing the cost of saying and the right responsible words.

Lines (December)

Words don’t come, lines stop before they start. Instead, I watch lines outside: lines of trees and fences and houses and clouds. The well-trained eye connects their slow changes, as stations pass. Lines of signs and windows and shops and cars. Their daily survival of repeat and compete. Lines of forehead and eyebrow and mouth and chin. Familiarity caught an instant, my face reflected, thinking such thoughts, then gone. Lines of midday and Wednesday and December and 2018. Dumb old diary almost done, always wanting names and lists and events and meetings, blank to the experience that words don’t come.

Anaesthetic (December)

 Words are held back, their unrestrained flow a concern. This anaesthetic releases language freely. Days later its dream is transported through conversations and landscapes. Which words to choose and when best to keep quiet? The medical centre brochure says leave twelve hours, at least, for the anaesthetic to wear off. I read this silently, avoid driving a car or making decisions. Yet friends say the high can go on for days. I don’t know what to say. If I speak am I guilty of raving unawares? Surreal tendencies? Synesthesia? One thing’s certain: it’s December. I keep this firmly in mind.

Vocabulary (December)

I wish the words would come. I know they are there, in serpentine certainty, but all I sense is beyond vocabulary. Words that are rings of rain in pools. Words that lack any colour or contour. Words that crinkle like origami fire. Words that sink with a ship at sea. Words that bend my brain forward. Words that load my feet with everything ever. Words that blow open the entire orchestra. Words that play tiggy. They fill the ribcage, press the surfaces, have no synonyms in English. Words that technology tints with electricity. Words that go black as download screensavers.