Eulogy (January)

[For Robert Whalley]  At Kinfolk café downtown, I watch people walk footpaths, looking for gifts, consolation, resolution, someone, silence. Facebook says ‘Today is Thomas Merton’s birthday. Say something to make it a happy day.’ Well Father Louis, footpath is our English inheritance: path where feet take us. Unlike American sidewalk, everyone pushed to the edge of some unstoppable commerce. January 31^st: days when Downunder goes back to school. We are always only ever beginning, you’d say. Find ourselves on the corner of Fourth and Walnut, again and again, wondering at passers-by. Write eulogies for one another, better late than never.

Hash (January)

[For Eleanor Loughnan Newton] Thorn, soft as that letter speaketh of our breathy lot, was pulled from English sometime Shakespearewards. Dipthong dipped long ago to no great alarm amongst readers. Eth met its death. Contenders continue to arise for 27^th letter of the English alphabet. Is #metoo a word? This innocent question has no ready answer. A sign has turned into a letter out of necessity, a computer-generated cipher improving English between computers. What hash will be left behind should someone introduce a better letter of transmission? Only time telleth in this the January of Online of which I speaketh.

Chalcedony (January)

[For Elizabeth Wade] Whether the January Family were two-faced double-crossers or just misunderstood, all we have now are their chalcedony cameos. Agate, blood-red fire one day, stone cold the next. Cornelian has a permanent brown smell under his Roman nose. Cousin Carnelian is a pseudomorph if ever there was one. Chrysoprase though is a gem, I will have nothing said against her. And Heliotrope seems okay, though a bit dotty. Aventurine’s gorgeous. The Onyx side of the Family are somewhat black-and-white, though with Sardonyx, what’s not to like? Even their names are stand-ins, given we’ve nothing else to go on.

Yarn (January)

[For Katherine Barnett] Penelope works the yarn night and day, unfretting fretting by turns. They are yearns and spurns, the yawns and torns, yangs and inevitable ying-things. Hills are that July colour cicadas intensify with cliché noise. The suitors are rubbish. Imagine what they'd be like at home. Unlike Odysseus. Altogether elsewhere, he lives the yarn hour by hour, shacked up with a witch or curling past whirlpools. His every third thought is home, more tears than trials, more pangs than ineffable siren singings. Sea is that January colour snow clouds darken. But first he must blind the monster, oblivion.

Effulgence (January)

[For Winsome Thomas] 6am 30o at the backdoor. Will it climb, the mercury with nowhere to escape its thermometer, to a record high? Early risers water tomatoes. They move about at record slows. Light-weight clothing. Birds remind us it’s morning, in case we’re in denial. Then effulgence, the sun that burns away adjectives, gets above the treeline. Windows glint their lengths on hillsides. The sun is not to be argued with. There is no argument, Madame Speaker. Trees and humans ready themselves. Cats find January shade. One day the effulgence will burn out, but not today, not in this lifetime.

Hubris (January)

[For Lenore Stephens] Cook’s Journal, January 2019: “Deep channels into Port Jackson. Almost collided with catamaran. Man drunk. Required to meet Morrison. He’s not Lord North. Kept repeating “You’re misunderstood by the populace.” My reply: “Why don’t they ask me a question?” Wants me to circumnavigate the continent. Why? Flinders did it. Stout fellow. Tall. His charts impeccable. Morrison got louder. Says I’ll win him election. Delusory? Reminds me when Endeavour hit reef. Annihilation imminent. Talking louder won’t help. Wished Morrison well. Advised he wants someone else. Opened secret instructions: ‘Clean up plastic island in Pacific’. Weighed anchor. Capricorn rising.”

Seashell (January)

[For Carol O’Connor] This January I re-read Francis Ponge, his ‘Notes pour un coquillage’ (1932). The argument goes that though a seashell is small, it’s a monument “colossal et précieux” compared with sand grains, more mysterious than any human monument. Impressively, a whole creature lives inside this monument. Human monuments (“Rome et Nîmes”) remind him of skeleton parts, not the same as the home of a hermit crab. Ponge imagines the impossible colossus that inhabited such ancient places. He decides that our monument is language, made from “la véritable sécrétion commune”, before describing the returning of all life into sand. 

Solidarity (January)

[For Deborah Zion] ‘Solidarity’ isn’t defined in my January-yellowed copy of ‘Keywords’ by Raymond Williams (1983). ‘Collective’ is about its closest synonym, “to describe people acting together”, or else “belongs to the new democratic consciousness of the eC19.” Today’s meaning comes not direct from Latin but via Polish, an existing word changing meaning through foreign influence. ‘Solidarnosc’ was the Gdansk labour union the government tried to suppress by martial law in, indeed, 1983. Vincent Buckley dedicated poems ‘For Solidarity’, identifying with its anti-Soviet push. Though Buckley, a Cold War worrier, also had the Catholic Church in mind, for not against.

Love (January)

[For Winsome Thomas] Bold banners bear the word LOVE on outside walls of the Old Customs House. They idle in the January breeze. Then a warning: SHOWING FOR A LIMITED TIME. Think of the thousands who would have been consoled had LOVE greeted them after the voyage. LOVE is an exhibition. But to love God and our neighbour as ourselves are commands, a reminder that we need to be reminded. Fairly often. We may make an exhibition of our love, but there’s a dizzy limit. We’ve limited time and resources. Next time we leave church may be in a box.