Fuel

 April 3 Word of the Day: Fuel

 

April fuel jokes abound, come thick and fast in recent days, gush in fact, keeping gush in the vocabulary. Gush is at risk of vanishing from use. Gush is at a standstill. Plans to purchase a horse or two, now that the car will soon be off the road for months, preoccupy our minds temporarily as we sit in peak hour traffic, wondering unconsciously if peak hour traffic itself will become a thing of the past. These conjectures never get as far as thinking about the amount of fuel required of a horse. It would return us to a time on the Heidelberg Road before motor vehicles, where we chat now idly amidst plenteous other and ravenous idling cars, checking stations for the rising cost of a litre of standard. Artificially collaged images circulate online. A bus with a tea clipper fastened to its roof, sporting over thirty sails, provides the best in wind power. Convertibles converted into coaches, BMWs into buggies, Toyotas into troikas – graphics whizz past on a production line, good for a laugh. Dependence on crushed fossils meets dependence on why-oh-why wi-fi. The days when fuel was simply the wood collected for the hearth fire are found in books. We have arrived at a pretty strait. Still, as we know, April fuel jokes have a short lifespan. Strike a match, the potassium and sulphur quickly flares then burns out. The import of the joke is understood and quickly forgotten, given its shared universal meaning: fuelishness is a joke on us all. Fuelishness is a tank of petrol, here today and gone tomorrow. What’s fuel for the goose is fuel for the gander. There is no fuel like an old fuel. A fuel and their money are soon parted. It is said that a practical joke is the lowest form of wit, and if it wasn’t before it is now. Only who is the joke on, the object of the joke or the teller? Newsfeeds deliver them and commentary explains them, until this form of humour needs be put to rest. The bigliest April fuel joke though is the one about the man who started a war without telling anyone and then expected them to join in and finish it.

Objects

 

[April]

 

“haiku april object”

 

emptied of undreamt refuse

wheelie bins

left yawning in dawning streets

 

pop-up theatre of old

roller-door

plays morning’s mini-drama

 

shorts or pants shoes or sandals

cardigan

or not the day cold or hot?

 

perhaps install white wooden

venetian

blinds on sun-facing windows

 

autumn comes early to the

computer

upgrades downloads old versions

 

train faces silent in thought

audio

wired to pocket podcasts

 

rushed some give a second glance

clocktower

but most don’t have a minute

 

tradies make up new storeys

scaffolding

comes to grips with construction

 

bike helmets walking frames ring

ceramic

coffee cups at street cafés

 

the present moment includes

cameras

distracting from the present

 

the pope dies elections pass

newspapers

flatten their worlds to an inch

 

prune plum-trees to improve heat

reduction

of buildings and the spring buds

 

so much depends upon the

secateurs

left in the old wheelbarrow

 

95% rain meets

overheads

runs then drops to long dry earth

 

night reads too much into the

standard lamp

window glowing in darkness

 

unfixed constellations of

satellites

leave transitory flight charts

 

dreaming so far that even

eiderdown

is faraway memory

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Attunement (April)

Prosaic is a favourite word in lectures of Rowan Williams. It can mean ordinary, common, daily, not quite as interesting as quite interesting, the norm. It’s antonym, presumably, is poetic. Carol and I laugh over dinner at these words: “The washing-up proved prosaic.” Two other favourites are alignment and attunement, both words indicators of relationship, harmony, shared experience, being in the zone. They’re anti-dogmatic, open to variation. Someone is alive, their mind at work, who is attuned. They are learning, have “something understood”, who are aligned. Inside, over wine, we go on about these words as outside, April cold descends.

Autumn (April)

Stars mazy at midnight struck a match when triceratops gallumphed about. Mind unfolds, like a leathern encyclopaedia, now heat relents. An amazing moon. Facts drop off the twig or ache for life-giving burial. Mornings criss-cross paths where we wake to work, the lather of concrete already cracked and repaired. April trees go auburn by degrees. Those frilly greens are on the way out. Hills of leaves smoking in gardens are a thing of the past. It’s lovely being wide awake to the city’s charge, lovely feeling tired of all the buzz. We plant out button-hard broad beans in the sun.

A-List (April)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzDVaKRApcg

For the Hard Listening Group

April, some headphone soul music, Friday evening: ‘I’ve been thinking about you’ (London Beat)- ‘Out of touch’ (Hall and Oates)- ‘Everywhere’ (Fleetwood Mac)- ‘Move on up’ (Curtis Mayfield)- ‘Give it up’ (KC & the Sunshine Band)- ‘Regret’ (New Order)- ‘Nowhere to run’ (Martha and the Vandellas)- ‘(Your love keeps lifting me) Higher and higher’ (Jackie Wilson)- ‘There’s a place’ (The Beatles)- ‘1979’ (Smashing Pumpkins)- ‘Fast car’ (Jonas Blue)- ‘Disappointed’ (Electronic)- ‘22’ (Taylor Swift)- “You keep me hangin’ on’ (The Supremes)- ‘Who’s gonna ride your wild horses’ (U2)- ‘Walk away Renee’ (Four Tops)- ‘I want your love’ (Chic)- ‘Cruisin’’ (Smokey Robinson)

Albedo (April)

Out from a cloud overwritten in chalk air, she greys the black city despite million million million fairy lights. Weeks after Easter the world turns to fading newspaper, washed-out white beneath scattered opinion, alphabets dead in the shadows. Those are trees that spiral where car lights and heaven lights go, spending strenuous hours replicating moody clouds. They gave them life. Clearly, the seas of the moon shimmer into zigzags. It must be raining up there, an extreme weather event churning her sea surfaces phosphorescent. Umbrellas are useless under such conditions. Leave them at home. April roofs boat float into May.

Algorithm (April)

The algorithms can only work with the data provided. Even then are the algorithms right? Right then the algorithms are even? Are the even algorithms right then? Then even the algorithms are right? Yes, insofar as yes. Are algorithms useful as such? Get back to us next April. You have our contacts. Are the algorithms accurate? Accurate as any select random choice confidently provides. Accurate according to random select. Within a range, sure. Are the algorithms representative? Yes and no. Are the algorithms none of the above? Hard to say but results are in and something seems to be working.

Agency (April)

Our house blew away in a storm. It took hours. Waking, I’d been asleep ten minutes. The agency causing this is a mystery. Daily I think of the National Security Agency. I send them my dreams. We all do. Who reads them? K. lived behind a letter. He headed a page: “April…” Words came, or they didn’t. He satirised Habsburg bureaucrats. He didn’t need neurosis. He knew their agencies watched him. After writing hundreds of pages he instructed his friends to destroy them. Why? No one can be trusted. K. has a museum in Prague. It hasn’t blown away yet.

Achieve (April)

“The achieve of, the mastery of the thing,” often comes to mind when admiring something well-done, where the work involved is simply implied in the outcome. A verb turned into a noun. Nor is it the same as achievement. Achieve becomes alive with the full implications of living that went into the thing’s being (active), alive now in its own being, or quiddity (passive). Thing is a comedown from achieve, but any other suggestions? The achieve is the thing-in-itself. Nor is mastery about control or winning a doctorate. It’s the Lord’s work of Creation, more awesome than kestrels in April.

Association (April)

Numb, late at night, on a trackwork replacement bus, and cold, I begin to free associate. Will it be A-words or passing street names? Tired from absence, it’s one way to get home: april ashen autumn auden ariel aerial aeschylus atrium aspidistra acorn arbour annals anno anneal annihilate angst anti-aircraft atom adam amble ambulatory ambulance accident atrophy alarm allow alas alack alpine asinine assured assailed abreast apricot application association assembly aura aurora aries apeshit aggressive assignment azure antler applicably appliqué appreciate aqua anchor anger aimless acrid acid anti-depressant antenna afterwards ahistorical agile agincourt avignon avenue away awash awl axe ace    

Absence (April)

That absence I notice, your calm words, escapes definition though I talk myself through it all day. I know down that road you are, this patchwork world with its sky of biblical proportions. No book gets close, for all their experience. Or that absence after we absent ourselves from a cause of confusion, conflict, or more dailiness, which is you and me. In that absence the road is a blissful reminder of elsewhere. The April sky is, just as well really, ours and everyone’s. Another city makes no claims on our person: we can be that presence and absence, ourselves.

Audio (April)

First and last loves: singing, whistling, clapping. Even they made childhood’s playthings artificial: upright piano, church organ, shire hall violin. Artificial really kicked in with radio: three minute thrills, mono symphonies, news flashes. 33-and-one-third grew to a wall of sound: album sleeves, greatest hits, needle jumps. And TV: cartoon countdowns, canned laughter, that living-room sound. Do I have a triad for CDs? Heralds of endless synthetic, tokens of permanent nostalgia, broken promises of indestructible. Arriving, not before time, at wallpaper: online clips, earplug cacophony, overabundant downloads. Still these abide: morning magpies, leaves riffing rifflings, April rain on a tin roof. 

Anyone (April)

Everyone is everywhere and is anyone. Though we are not anyone, it’s others who could be anyone, minding their own business, or not, just like us. We think of everyone we have known and they are not just anyone. They could be no more anyone than us, who bear in ourselves everything and everywhere and everyone we have ever been near. April we remember someone and someone, names and faces, words and actions from a past already well past, where they are not anyone but peculiar to us, a being and a story. They may show anytime, blessed and inside.

Attention (April)

Size gives them away, seen from back windows, and their colour. As the bird book says, “edged broadly grey,” not a colour to attract attention, but so large a bird is all I see. Every few years a black-faced cuckoo-shrike visits our garden. April they migrate north, which includes stopovers on wooded ridges. I watch the bird in the plum tree: “weak in foot but strong in wing… their technique is to fly from tree to tree, pausing briefly on each to look about before moving on.” Last month, Tasmania possibly, next month, Queensland possibly. I look again, it’s gone.

Ash (April)

Mountain ash, that quite diminutive awfully Englishy name for the tallest trees in the world. I stand inside one and imagine myself a rainforest rat, though rat too is inappropriate for the native marsupial. Some of the ash trees have nameplates by the track, decked with superlatives. Busloads tramp past, taking pictures of the nameplate, for future reference. Or themselves: middle-aged wood nymph in sensible daywear. There are no tallest anymore and our foolish world thrives on proofs. They were axed and felled, that weren’t reduced to a namesake by bushfire. This April we visit them and collect fern specimens.