H

 

[H]

 

birdsong Harp could transcribe were fingers that swift magpie wren lorikeet

squiggly words turn Hard rubbish into sublime rejects line nature strip

white wands of number nineteen primavera Heatwave cherry blossom

another anther cipher tumbling black dots collect Honey in sum

long sliding brushstrokes saying Horizon in words what cannot be said

fuji t-shirts hats sunfilled undies Hoist lines aflutter upsidedown

sloppy words ask how many points does it take to make a Hakea

a fleeting resolution never to write even one more Haiku

 

grounds leaves cabbage compost Husks their ragged ends black soil rich with promise

rooftops treetops full moon whitened up quietly, the Half moon blacks out

ink squared inhabits House exhibits elements reasons for building

bumps in the night mouse Hen fox tawny frogmouth? inkwell isn’t saying

window on garden nightfalls when Hand grand with words clicks the bedside lamp

even then lavender wet leaves oregano cense clean night air dreams

 

Halloween

 

Lawns are being turned into massacre sites. Once more it’s the season of faux cobwebs over fences, but this year the spiders are three times larger than last year, spreadeagled across windows or crawling artistically from letterboxes. It’s familiar weird, but this year feels different. Consumer excess has multiple skeletons dangling from porticoes and eucalypt branches. Skulls emerge from soil requiring the attention of a host of forensic pathologists. By the time the frisky kids in superhero costumes hit the streets on the 31^st, it’s a wonder what they will make of their normally death-denying neighbours who have turned their front gardens into graveyards. It’s a question that hangs in the air, skeleton-like, as I walk the streets on my constitutional. How many gravestones must they navigate in order to ask trick or treat? Gigantic plastic pumpkins on footpaths are another hurdle, several times larger than any known pumpkin and seemingly the results of a nuclear accident, they come in a lurid orange more excessive than the hair dye of the erstwhile American president. What are the young witches and draculas and ballerinas and gladiators to make of their neighbourhood, as each place they visit competes in making their home the bestest horror movie set in the street, dripping with blood. The other week was the referendum. It reminded us that the entire land of Australia is a graveyard, where the dead are many. At least, that was an underlying reality of the referendum, which in simple language terms was about giving people a voice. Remembering those who have departed this life was an essential, though largely unmentioned, reality behind why people said yes or no to a voice. The autumnal resonances of Halloween in our consumer culture have been transformed, necessarily in Australia in October, into a springtime funtime for children and occasional adults. They run the odd side, the even side, more interested in treats than tricks. Neighbours oblige. They dash unthinkingly over the land of roadmap grids and ‘creepy’ front gates, over the land where (see above) the dead are many.  The tricksters and treaters seem capable of believing anything, even that consumption is eternal, that cobwebs will be rolled up and stored for next year and that their cut price skeletons will find a home in an op shop. Yet behind all the friskiness and ‘scariness’, oh so spooky, other matters are waiting to meet them. Matters that the calendar in days following has already had in mind long before the frivolous decades of K-Mart craniums. Questions, like what exactly is our relationship to all the living and the dead? Can they be bought? And anyway, what is a saint?

J

 

[J]

 

Broken handles cracked cornices ended cities

Jeremiah was a committee breathed aleph breath:

stand behind this line, backend blown out tongue!

How do committeemen say, bulldozed into the sea?

 

Aim in this crushed context, their job in a word

to push rubble into airshape, restart knowing.

Overnight be exile, over again, all over

razed to the ground not once, twice, centuries.

 

Would you say Jordie they’re the first book

distress signals from inside the nowhere

I can’t breathe, spoke in their own version?

 

Centuries to unchoke, to unbroke buildings

letters of tears flames rags eyes closing

heat and force wouldn’t you say, curling fragments.

E

 

Drawings of neurons by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934)

[E]

 

Effervescent neurons electrifying eons

eking selfsame connects, eeking extra effects

evoking impressions, provoking expressions –

ask a question and get an equation.

 

Endless their fibre ends gloss touch-and-go eros

etch tiniest scars, each network of stars.

Emails send consequence, emails receive sequences.

Energy, eternal delight, softens at night.

 

Extraordinary minds! Every one finds

yes and yes to guess, formerly just suggest.

Neurons become errands, clustered events unerrored

 

light years under skull dome, brightness beneath bone.

Cell emitters the factors, the exclusive actors

beeping low beam in dreams, steeping broad daytime’s schemes.

K

 

[K]

 

Prague. Autumn Twenty Twenty-Three. Dear K.,

the lid lifts on the world, but what’s for supper?

I reply to yours of the 1st inst. Suffer

I have your number so have a nice day.

 

New paragraph. The cravat is back and very.

Bureaucrats have bungled again alas

glass newspapers call their faces faceless.

Archduke is a word in a dictionary.

 

Next year is your mortal centenary.

Bravo to all your unburnt manuscripts!

I have to answer this phone call, okay?

Public statues praise entomology.

Every room in town somehow comes to grips.

Until next time, as they say, they would, K.

R

 

[R]

 

Last week I dreamt aisles shadowed in volumes

a sortie of bees deluged me to the floor finite

an oaken door led into vast Raged night

great Rings of light in skies geometric allumes

fading sideways replaced by Renaissance

constellations crosshatch forms Scorpio Aries

the end of all things, in a word Redundancy

the all-known lost (again) prospect of absence.

 

I dream tonight of a boy in Rising fields

learning the unfamiliar names of colours

his book of wonderful the first Read of its kind

how language yields, appeals, offers up shields

he walks a Real metropolis of others’ private valour

free only in the first instants of ties that bind.

O

 

[O]

 

O the great O that today is unlettered cloud

emerging and merging from horizon irrepressibly

familiar hue rhyming with true inexpressibly

expressing the oceans, continual and prowed

 

that yesterday was something hour upon hour

words could not describe or art redesign

and tomorrow apparently might be just fine

though later in the day 95% showers

 

meets the O of the eye immense in its place

sensation surround secure from the ground

teaming spectrum multiplying forms

 

blinking away specks bright light darkest space

searching out abound discerning astound

picking up letters words before the storms