Road

 

The Greet Motion Wrote, a winding rarely straightforward passage, remains a ‘WORK IN PROGRESS’ sign tree-thundered and sixty-sticks daze of the yeah. Now worries! While loose rocks roll unto the strayed and narrow devolve’s elbow, a block-and-wait debris debut stopping traffic in its trackie daiquiris. Très fuck! That, or ocean errrrrrrosion cliffside or climbsift bottoms out basely the old macadam, leaving madam driver cursing the sea, and all who sail honour, its waves curtsying in return shell we dance? Wye is one of its quests yon, marked by a boulevarde of dreams, a clickety-clackety fiery-furious pitty-paddy path. Also, it zone surf club. Wye?, ask the waves, not waiting for an answer, waiving all objections and a gain racing into sure for foam and fortune. Drift would when drift can. See weed once and seen it all. One for all and all for Lorne, the whaddawurrung coast defied definitely defiantly even lookout yet say not definitively the pick of progress. The push and shovel of shove and level they laid into the inclinations of a kindness of echidna heights. More miles made from explosion than explanation. The axe of big ask respondez-viewed to the increased demands on the coast of living. This cast-up of leads starred lifelong diggers dogged in dugouts, extras that inclouded witnesses such as their doggies ditto, ready and able for years of relandscarping, entrenched in mined from the foregoing Wipers horrorshow. Angle to sea perpendiculous they endeavoured, swags of rock they airdropt to seasides, airily in let their dual carriageway up unto apollonian mists then down again to the sea in shifts. It's A-Grade Notion Rude curved clumsilly carved considerately like Aghost Roadin rode up rode down for the alltimes pre-imagined contours of everyman’s and woman’s open-air tourer, turning at bends, zooming up hellish hillside edges, wending bends, leafing surf and fern in the rarevision mer-roar, overpassing not permitted, and generally tourer-lourering merathons uphill and roundabout. Footsore without, foreshores with, and for sure, ah for shure, foot to the floor, shipshapewrecks avoided. One outcome is debtours, pontifix maximess, a future of fracture features. These include (from l’East to Waste): Turnkey, Separating Creack, Kannot Reverse, Schemes Crook, Appalling Bay, the Twelve Apotholes, Lunged-in Arch (formerly Lunged-in Bridge), Part Crumble, and Worninbell. While clime change, mate, adds further fractions off frictions to the facts not fictions of the old soldiers’ Groan Ozone Rut, the long and winding road that leads to yawn dawn, they’ve sunset that road before a lorn Lorne time ago, that the wild and windy night that the rain washed away. 

 

PROGRAM NOTES: This July, I joined Finnegans Wake Reading Group via zoom at Wye River. Chat included the reminder that during the composition of the novel (1922-1939) James Joyce gave it the provisional title ‘Work in Progress’, the same sort of wording seen on signs anywhere along the Great Ocean Road any day of the year. This is either because the Road is in constant need of repair from natural occurrences, or the Road has never been completed, being in a permanent state of creative update. I am open to other explanations too. It is what it is. Hence this ode to the Road written in wakese, the poetic language invented by Joyce for the writing of his unique novel. Reading the Wake has this effect on me, of wishing to write in wakese.