S

 

[S]

 

Only water writes what’s writ in water

shadowing swimming suddenly shifting

sverdrup by sverdrup the sea’s heavy lifting

heaves up to the sun and drowns every quarter …

water speaks these words the air turns nature

syllabic singing satisfied subtle

sentence by sentence stuck in the middle

something anything that speaks as creature

symphonic surly saturnine saintly …

still water runs leaps brooks no argument

showers signatures itself addressing

sonorous salt-free singular salty

simplest sign where is rainbow and serpent

sunshine and moonpull … supplying blessing

 

 

S (May)

Sound, a ceaseless sensual symphony so to speak, a susurrus of invisible waves in the shell-like, the swirling surfs of May. Touch- curly contour map fingertips, serpentine arms body legs –feels our nervous way with a seemingly seamless absence of nerves. Sight- so direct, enveloped, sorting every shape depth colour –moves outward around sideways, its designed efforts willed towards design. Taste, brought to us today by that slippery servant, the tongue, tests our sensitive judgements between ration rationale and obesity. Smell, cartoonist’s fantasy, their esses of sweetest aroma rise to nicety nostrils, as also select stinks of science stable S-bend.

S (February)

'Golden Summer, Clarendon' (1983) John Olsen

S is for Sun and from sun serpentine rays cut sand and shelter of sandbanks. Sun turns sapphire, as when eyes close onto sun’s negative, sometime. Sun is bush road, lost orchard of ghost house: crow casts shadow, dog dream-bends on porch. Sun picks up speed, crosses the drowning blue harbour, drops gear through Darlinghurst. Just as in John Olsen (Closing February). His shorthand says S is for Seasons, T is for Tendon, their tendency to curve and grace, to drag the paintbrush, wiggle and widen, sign off with similar familiarity, while pelicans push off, still, and frogs translate Basho.

S (September)

South, where windscreen morning unfreezes in the planet’s most liveable timezone and drips onto our schoolday baggage as through semi-built parts of our city we travel, imagining melaleuca coastlines facing Antarctica. September, when stripy lorikeets sight the teensiest flower shifts and woop-swoop, air floods everywhere defying all laws that would explain air – something like that! Saturday too far away, or Sunday behind yet before us with its easing of pain – they remain and beckon, in between the hours we must what we must, all things being equal, which is to say unequal, snaking their way inexplicably through our workaday senses.