Seawall

 Seawall

Not of sufficient significance to have a name 

I am a seawall. The only way to see me is by looking up. My age is young but I am made of ancient stones that surrounded me. Their tawny or dark-grey colours have rested here for eons. Many are riddled with honeycomb bowls or slope smooth and black, even darker when saltwater washes over their surfaces daily. Returned diggers and laconic stoneworkers chipped the thin rectangles for placement. Their balancing act keeps the earth in place. The men had only bush, sea, and sky, while today I have softened into the landscape, their work done. Because I hold aloft the Great Ocean Road. Traffic is invisible from the rockpools. Surge rushes into the troughs with abrupt thunder, withdrawing only slowly as water particles dry on skin. And the nearby relay of closing waves on beach and reef is a gentle rhythm to the ear. Louder than the unseen traffic above, the random exhaust or macho shift of motorbike gears, occasional note of something else going on. Fine grains of mortar may be washed by the night tide or daytime’s finger grip of rockhoppers traversing to and from Separation Creek. New filler has been slapped into crevices here and there where crumble turned to gap. I am solid and resolute. Without me the Road would not exist. Erosion and hardest bracken would make the coast impassable. Forests of eucalypt would fall into the sea. I am the quietest outcome of engineering, no two blocks the same, with a steady blank look. I am warmest in the mornings when sun rises across the strait. Cockatoos make themselves known. A container on the horizon is an object lesson. White blond driftwood tangles with kelp bubbles and tree fern corpses submitted lately by the sea for someone’s consideration. Come midday my purpose stands in high relief. Chatting adults and fossicking kids step from boulder to boulder away from the spray. Their careful stepping in contrast to the rushing surge of water through the corridors of stone, each safe footing an assurance of confidence. Once every so often lately teenagers spraypaint the base with their cool logos. Their artwork sings of happy stealth, but does not outlast the roadsigns high above us, out of sight, on edge. Artwork that will fade to a fad. I am smooth, relatively speaking. I will outlast the afternoon. After the rockhoppers are home again, with their seashell and knotty stick. I shall stare into night as I have all my life, before the Southern Cross rising lopsided from the depths. The cold sets in and a whale passes by. Very rarely a seal still lumbers alive up the stones, for safety or bearings. Wallows in a pool spilling down to another pool, and so on, unfailing into the swirl and surge again. I keep separate the earth from the sea. My back holds the ground and my face is the closest reach of water’s tempestuous edge. Echidnas have nestled against my insider protection, burrowed at a moment’s notice. I imitate the cliffs that shadow the Road and determine its snaking. Through winter I am a forgotten fortress, when in spring storms cannot dislodge a single rectangle. Lately the Road services net the falling heights nearby, plunging silver bolts to hold geography in place. Bushfire wipes out grip, root systems have tentative starts. But I have a firm stand. Grass cannot find a niche nor acacia seed a gap to crack open. March is an interesting time. I rest from the long heat. Gannets pass by unexpectedly. And a few humans each day, to remind the world in particular of humanity. Waves against the reef reach stupendous heights and rain arrives in impressive black clouds.

 

Grammar

 

[December]

 "grammar haiku december"

poetry stored in the clouds

manuscripts

accumulate to dissolve

 

searching the supermarket

syllables

for all the sugars and spice

 

snowflakes santas stables stars

objective

correlatives more galore

 

light purple jacaranda

cedillas

soft land hard concrete footpaths

 

city of many childhoods

arguments

that days observe and resolve

 

traffic lights news updates

autocues

streaming subtitling crave rest

 

even this great crass corrupt

period

will end anon period

 

behind ring-road freeway sign

directions

sits another pam the bird

 

rainclouds coastwards greyblack hold

lacuna

seascapes beachheads landfall rain

 

curling drifting wye river

adjectives

screeching warbling swirling blue

 

like roads disappear round bends

sentences

offer more than what they say

 

art makes of bark and leaves fine

rendering

trees’ unending survival

 

trees experience choicest

writer’s block

too many choices of green

 

surf could care less about the

predicate

surging submerging splurging

 

fairy wren river motions

conjunction

ever with cormorant sea

 

separating the days’ long

paragraphs

lines from the kookaburras

 

summery is a one word

summary

fairly accurate to say

 

 

 

 

 

 

July

 

“wye july haiku”

 

*of droplet thread rising stream

waterfall

off leaf stone ledge fern frond pool

 

*fire stump frills brief rainbow

rosella

and another on seed hunt

 

*renaissance earplug drops of

spotify

daybreak’s mist trickling window

 

*kindling powder redgum dust

fireplace

morning’s level playing field

 

*corrugated ripples ring

water tank

wherein deep waters run still

 

*white smoke drifts above gully

rainwater

reflects on decking glistens

 

*smoothest mud wettest leaf where

echidna

spiralled a ball of a time

 

*curvy cloudy sky tingling

eucalypts

claw boulder underground creak

 

*gravel grip vehicle climbs

boulevarde

then again birdcall silence

 

*bolstered balustraded bold

weekenders

pop corks watch screens have a doze

 

*green neck torsion straightened

king parrot

black claw precision ambles

 

*treetop crests waving miles meet

horizon

permanent marker sea line

 

*cold elongated grassy

watercourse

old unsung storm-drain the sea

 

*dropdown seaviews wildweeds up

no-through-road

chorus raucous cockatoos

 

*water everywhere high tide

erosion

bark hangings drip from branches

 

*guttering froth blowholes gasp

salt water

returns thunder against reef

 

*uncontained sky white grey blue

container

uncontained sea grey blue green

 

 

 

 

 

 

Road

 

I can’t tell you how happy I am to share with driving companions views of morning light across miles of ocean below cliffs where the Road rounds new corners beyond inlets and indents; light that shines and flashes across water otherwise a wintry grey when a break in suspended raincloud lights up also towering inclines of towering eucalypts to something clearly green. It defies description, effortless or not, the workmen in thermals constructing the new bridge over Wye River at the Road, the birdlife through the trees, their clean distinctions of plumage, surprise showing of kangaroo or koala, a dog and his human doing two-step with the waves, despite all my (our) intensive and most imaginative efforts with English. Words cannot express the pleasure of seeing a fallen tree trunk long since cut into sections till only the base remains, resting after years at a Roadside creek crossing where moisture and rot cause grass and small flowers to sprout in abundance, reminiscent of Albrecht Dürer’s ‘Great Piece of Turf’, albeit near a sign warning that I am located at an Otways Weed Hotspot. Just as I cannot start to say how much of an effect there is when noticing the remains of the Christmas Day bushfire amidst regrowth nine years later, the whitened trunks and blackened stumps on hillsides deluged by so much green, the extensive earthworks on public land and private shoring up and stabilising the collateral erosion brought on by fire and exposure. Words cannot do justice, watercolour whatever, to the shy first buds of winter, new bends of fern like bass clefs at the base line, or even the casualties of blackberry spraying; and, given that, how can I possibly express (or anyone) in encyclopaedic, minute detail the character of birdsong, the Roadmap home without thinking “That’s one way”, and again, “Funny, that!” Countless efforts have been made to describe raindrops almost without notice beginning to land on decking, pathways, Road before increasing in force and suddenly landing in white torrential extremes, rising water streaming in floods wherever gravity sends the rushing downpours, but how many of the countless efforts are remembered hours or days later? I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am in the midst of creation finding the words, quickly or reflectively, plainly or reflexively, to key the Road into the window of light later, a page of language surfing in crests of cursives and dependings before gone again undertowed back into the mysterious depths of language; happy even at its hairiest, the hairpin changes of metaphor. The stories have never been told that are being enacted at windows of light on the riverside hills and above the ocean and Road now night silently falls, such dialogues as would captivate could they ever be turned into living fragments of theatre, as I lower the blinds on our windows of light to keep in the heat and keep out the cold and the solstice passes in reading and sleep.

Bird

 

Here at Wye River time may include birdwatching on the iPhone. ‘Superb blue wren’ opens the list in Notes, keeping in mind at all times the female, who is more superb brown wren. They bob up from the bracken below, in hope of seed. How they move from place to place in seconds is an optical marvel, ditto how they land on a railing from the decking in a trice. Not surprisingly, soon to show up amidst the tall timber of the steep slope is Item: ‘Sulphur-crested cockatoo’. Several in fact, they glide in packs, cocking their headdress towards an eighth of apple, or the vicinity in general in proprietorial air. Their stride is wide, but they’ll POQ if there’s a better offer up the valley. Pleasingly, ‘Kookaburra’ can be added to the list, usually heard before seen but this time silent swooping to the decking from powerlines. They grab a curl of orange peel and bash it against the timber like a snake, before seeing it’s not what they thought it was. Their bearing is calm, superior. They bide their time, as you do when in charge. Likewise disposed is ‘Magpie’, glancing from side to side, smart as. Today is thin pickings in wintry Wye, what with the residents up in Town or staying inside out of the cold. Exit with a brief warble, back another day. Happily the name ‘King parrot’ is added to the list in the iPhone, as they descend brightly in greens and reds from the forests of the hinterland. Shyer when young, they hold back from taking strawberry tops from our hands. Gathering about the decking table they bicker one another for a choice slice. If the day is sunny we walk down to the store and the beach: ‘Seagull’. On the way downhill the restored gardens of native coastal bushes twitch with, quick note in Notes: ‘Firetail’. Maybe a dozen of them darting up the ladders of banksias. At the river itself construction is underway on a new bridge, hence the stop-start of one lane traffic and grind of truck machinery grating against the familiar regularity of the surf waves. ‘Heron’ keeps its distance upriver amidst bulrushes and overhang. Birds that could only be ‘Cormorant’ grace the outlines of branch and reef. After chai at the store and inspection of the beach, time may include walking the long way home with the reassuring, some would say inevitable, appearance in air-bending numbers of: ‘Crimson rosella’. Headlong they weave between eucalypts, screech with what we always assume is happiness, to land up at the decking later in time for the funtime morsels. Then, when least expected, the moment: ‘Satin bowerbird’. Mrs Green more commonly than Mr Blue, but all the same we report the news back down the line in a soft voice. Shy as, but watching all the time, they reconnoitre just outside the edges of vision, grabbing the grape under the radar. The iPhone list includes sightings passed on to the scribe. For example, “one that seemed to have a beard,” which flipping through The Slater Field Guide to Australian Birds’ (Revised and update edition) we adduce to be a New Holland Honeyeater. “One with a yellow belly” requires more information, though on subsequent walks we conclude, after several sightings, it was ‘Wattlebird’. “A grey bird with a very long neck” is noted for future reference, and good luck with that! “A bird with a beak that goes chisssssssss” is recorded, the sound there described in the air by our reporter as protruding some distance from the head. Sightings later confirm it is: ‘Egret’. ‘Duck’ is another river bird, duly noted. Night follows day like some great &c. Variations on these sightings displace the notion of repetition, birdland being cyclic. Still, reports drift in for the iPhone: “A great seabird that is all black and bulbous and follows the line where the sand meets the ocean.” Over a fresh pot of chai we agree: ‘Great cormorant’. Sent from my iPhone.

Waterfall

[Found poem: ‘Waterfalls of the Otway Ranges’, by Anthony Car, 1^st edition, 2021.]

Waterfalls can be dangerous places and you should always keep this in mind. Water and rock can be a slippery combination which can easily lead to injury. Carry a first aid kit. Expect mobile phones to be out of coverage at some areas. The river has carved and formed several deep gorges with rapids, cascades and waterfalls that are truly spectacular. Small cascades are covered by logs which have piled up in front of it, collected there from when the river was in flood. Another flow can be seen emerging from a side tributary. A tributary forms a wonderful waterfall with a great height and is particularly impressive when the rainfall has been plentiful. Sometimes they leap into an abyss. There are wonderful still pools and water nooks flounced in hartstongue maiden hair and star-fern. What cannot be seen from the lookout are the other tiers that exist above. They are not accessible by any track. The falls are not as well-known. In fact, the name was in danger of disappearing altogether. This may be due to it being less visited, tucked away, and not as big. (I used a slow shutter speed to create the swirl in the pool.) Please note that this area is steep and dangerous and not to be attempted by the inexperienced. Finding some of the forgotten and named waterfalls later was in retrospect fortuitous. Some moments come together and can be quite rewarding. A satisfying flow. Perpendicular rock. Cool verdure. Waterfalls can also be quite peaceful, like watching a campfire. That is why it is beneficial to spend time at each waterfall watching it as it changes throughout the day. Babbling down its stony course. Cliffs towering above. Great gums towering. Sunlight striking on the treeferns. Exciting and risky scrambles. The falls, due to their difficulty of access, remained somewhat esoteric for some time. The spray of water. Noise of falling water. A grand experience. A giant colourful boulder perched on top, whereby the water sneaks through the tiny gap underneath. Adds to the charm and appeal of the setting. Literally a scenic gem. A great asset to our State. The name derived from an Indigenous word meaning by the sea. Some waterfalls need to have the right amount of flow rate to look at their finest. High streamflow caused by prolonged soaking rains. Standing at these locations is both an inspiration and privilege. Fanning as it progresses. Map reading and scanning is a further joy to develop allowing you to find these hidden treasures. Innumerable gullies. The lucid stream dimpling with smiles, then breaking into wreaths of creamy foam. A forest primeval dropping over some broad and shallow ledges. Glittering in the light. Darkening with a green gloom. Falling into a pretty basin. The area is steep and gorgeous but also highly dangerous. They are now called Galliebarinda, coming from an Aboriginal word meaning waterfall.

Sea

 

Yesterday the sea was a bristling flatness, thousands of tiny whitecaps and cat’s paws under duress of the west wind. Today the rains have come, turning all sights into grey rainfall to the shore, then temporary calm and its rainbows, then more rain setting in. Tomorrow above the Great Ocean Road I might spend time watching ships on the horizon, surfers under curls, dogs on the shore, if the rains go. Josep Pla, on the other hand, has trouble understanding what people find in the open sea that they can spend so long staring at it. He interviews a fisherman who spends more time staring at the sea than anyone else. When Pla pushes him about why he does this for such lengths of time, the fisherman replies, “I don’t know … I couldn’t say …” Pla calls this practice an enigma. One time he tries out Aeschylus’s phrase “The sea, ineffable smile,” on another old salt, only to be rebuked with “Have you ever seen the sea smile?” Pla concludes, this may be no more than a literary turn of phrase, a futile fiction. He refers to Lord Byron’s adjectives for the sea, in the French translation. And his Catalan hero Eugeni d’Ors, aka Xenius: “The sea, in its stark nakedness.” This puts me in mind of other short definitions, for example Marianne Moore’s forbidding poem on the subject, entitled ‘A Grave’. James Reeves says “the sea is a hungry dog,” and any amount of ink has flowed on what Homer means by “the wine dark sea.” Leaving us to come up, like Pla, with our own very short definitions of this vastest expanse on Earth. His diary of 1918-1919 ‘Quadern Gris’ (‘The Gray Notebook’) was finally translated from Catalan nearly one hundred years afterwards. I wonder if he ever softened towards the sea? He finds it horrible, without beauty, tiresome, “a harsh, horrendous form assumed by nature.” One wonders if, aged 22 on the day of this entry 30^th September 1919, he is not indulging in youthful playful dispute, honing his wits with university friends in Barcelona. If you must get into dialectic on a subject, what bigger or graver than the sea? “The open sea on its own is horrendous, oppressive, and unpleasantly sterile,” Pla writes, an unusual position to take if you think most of life came out of the fertile sea. However, this subjective mood changes when he looks at sea in relation to land, stating that “a mixture of land and sea is magnificent – a continuous, surprising source of beauty.” Soon he is writing in superlatives, admiring how this mixture is the essential element of beauty ascribed to Catalonia’s seaside towns and most particularly Barcelona itself, where it is “one of the most beautiful things about the city.” I put down his book to look again at the sea, that primary fact of existence, never primarily an aesthetic proposition. What is the right word for sea, if you can only have one word? Below that grey wintry plane that has no straight borders, that can be all horizon and no straight lines, entire worlds exist we can hardly imagine, unaware of our right word, our changing opinions.

Bird

 

In Wye River before Christmas, I sit at the picture windows re-reading ‘The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon’. My eye revisits Entry no. 28: Birds. Looking up on Saturday I watch from the same windows the flight of a sulphur-crested cockatoo over the river, backdrop the sea. Its plumage is pure white as the wave crests. In the evening, kookaburras chortle from the park. They will ‘laugh’ at unexpected times, not just at daybreak: heartening surprise. Next day blue fairy wrens dart onto the decking. Their waltzing is like fidgeting, then they skedaddle. At sunset, a small flock of currawongs fly across the ridge towards night home. One has food in its beak,  but what is it? Monday, a magpie lands and stands on a nearby roof. Its head strikes the classical heroic pose renowned of magpies, counterpoint to the neighbour’s abstract off-centre antenna. Garden birds, unidentifiable, swim through dusk air catching midges in the fading heat. On Tuesday Bridie sees a large bird on a low branch above the river. Binoculars improve things, but we cannot agree if it’s an egret or heron, or petrel even. The beak is orange, neck is too short, it’s more black than white. Answers hang in the air, but when we magnify the lenses again, the bird has flown. Next day discussion continues about petrels, their likeness to shearwaters, their relative size. We watch petrels from the safety of the car, as we drive into Apollo Bay for lunch. Out from the clifftops they ride on the thermals, backdrop the sea, magnificent and defiant. Wednesday is the first occasion this week we sight king parrots. Their glossy green plumage and orange heads are most familiar up at the house. Perhaps weeks of rain have kept them inland. Crimson rosellas inspect a woodheap: charming. Later they inspect our decking for seeds and crumbs. A flock flying through the trees at full speed is an event. BoM said it would rain on Thursday and here it is, raining on Thursday. Later in the morning rain clears and I continue reading Sei Shōnagon above the gully, its expansive view of inlet and sea, outside at the back of the house. Rosellas. Thrushes. Wattlebirds. Cockatoos. They come and go in their own ways. At tea time we observe birds flying down to eat seed scattered on the decking table. Bridie and I agree that rosellas are polite eaters, while cockatoos are garrulous. I notice on the last day of our stay how conspicuous by their absence are satin bowerbirds. Perhaps scrub clearances have forced them over to Separation Creek. Is that likely? Also, firetails, I haven’t seen any firetails for a while, wishing the finches hopping on a distant branch were such. We laugh at the friendly whistle of the rosella pecking at its breakfast. Cute, we call the whistle, but what does cute mean? It seems a synonym for lovely, or companionable. Sweet, as the Italians say, and Fitzroy baristas.

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.

Beach

 

Walking on the winter beach we do not think of them, the few, as a cloud of electricity, a milky way of flesh, a ganglion of extremities. Those few who, we think, brave the cold wind and grey sky, though brave is an assumption, as they walk enjoyably if earnestly along the environment. Later, at the house, we dream away triads of the walkers – a tower of ivory, a tree of freedom, a geometry of expressions – in the mind’s eye, during the creamy third coffee. The grey-blue of ocean and general atmosphere and further approaching rain squalls are affective causes, a traditional landscape, a salutary reminder for the walkers who tread the wet sand at this time of the day. Weather vanes spin rapidly, while the beach scrub responds to changing conditions in the way it’s grown used to. Driftwood is charred from a beach fire and seaweed runs in dishevelled lines where dry meets wet, sentences requiring disentangling by surf spin. Our companion canines are classic to this scenario, chasing a sodden tennis ball, skirting incoming foam. He she is a bundle of fur, leap of limbs, an advertisement of rainy day. The paws print abstract poetry into the half-liquid called sand. It won’t be an age before it’s erased, one sweep of water the colour of blotter. Higher calculus, political editorial, historical intuitions do not catch the mind of the walkers caught in the sea wind between a strand and a hard reef, their thoughts turned to colours of the visible variety, at a temporary loss for words. It is a medium of all mediums, a fountain of configuration, a balancer of shoals that dares to glide upon a surfboard down the dark turning of the closing waves. There are no surfers today, only the few walkers who for some reason or other have left their warm houses on steep slopes to, as they say, walk the dog, stretch the legs, clear the head a bit. Tomorrow and tomorrow for surfboards. History however itself intervenes in the form of a largest of all blackness, a giant of underwater cooees, a presence blowing its stack into finest water mists thence falling forward toward the deep from a standing upthrust into air, some metres from shore. Fortunate are the few who in their nonplussed trudge witness this new south whale, thoughts vary as to the type, angling itself just below and just above then the grey surface, creasing white splashes. We understand this sight, so distant so close, that soon enough will vanish towards the horizon, an adjective in search of a collective noun, a big mention become a memory over dinner, vanish where a massive blackness advances and rain will obscure the tracks. They are scampering through the ti-tree, the coats of many colours, their eyes of water gleam, their paws of dig-fast, with trailing behind them the now anxious jogging triads we know so well. Alone, only later, triple rainbows will emerge. 

Marimba

 

Rain begins again its random intervals of percussion on the decking. The beats become a blur of wash, harder and harder, an orchestral seethe increasing in volume and strength. Watery film on the planks collects and absorbs the downbeats, spreading effect louder as the downpour gets heavier. Very soon the sound of rain upon wood will become a uniform roar, only wavering softer or louder as the wind lets up or gets stronger by minor degrees. My attention to the acoustics of wood has been enlivened by listening to the marimba, played at the wedding this weekend before, during, and after the ceremony. The fine scene by the riverside was settled by the gracious sounds from smoothed panels of the marimba, cool and delectable in the air. Here at our hideaway in Kennett River, the day after the wedding, the dreamy after-effects of good prosecco and a night of celebration and dance floor in the Wye River Store, is to listen yet more closely to the sounds of timber, the timbres of which are innumerable, occurring unnoticeably at any time. Unless I think to notice them by a conscious act of the will. The tiny falling fronds of eucalyptus that crash on to the decking slap into the rainy timber, their hard centre and swish leaves, over in seconds. The creak of the trees themselves, taller than the house, has undetectable origins, deep in their lively core. Bark rattles loosely against trunks. A branch snaps and plunges into branches below, to dangle or thrash until the wind subsides, and eventually even the rain. The calm of subsidence brings out other sounds. Lizards tap inside hillocks of sticks. Indetectable is the click of bird claw on tree branch, come then gone, the sensational search for food. Subtle crunch of animal feet over ground twigs. Hard to believe how these lithe columns of timber, swaying against themselves, could end up as clattering driftwood, disintegrate in a bonfire, or worse. They push millions of leaves to make storm sounds, impossible on a funky marimba, even in a fair breeze. Marimbists, maybe, maybe not? Walking with a stick along the paths we let ripple it along a fence, or tap at objects with our fortunate grip on reality. Inside, my feet stepping up the wooden stair quicker or slower take the marimba path, the beat to any kind of improvisation, the start of a tune, a tune that may walk which-way into any room. Preparation for dinner is a sinfonia of chopping block, slicing of avocado and quartering of pear. Chairs scrape crosswise on floorboards as chatterers arrive to sit for the meal. The peppermill clomps along the table. I could start dreaming of the other instruments, the electric guitar like unto vehicles taking corners of the Great Ocean Road. Or the bass guitar, with its on-again off-again registers, like the old fridge in the corner. For now it’s touch wood.  

Ocean

Write and rewrite and rewrite [ocean] a grey width that dazzles in pools when sun casts between cloud, then shadows again as if a vast creature loomed just below, only in an hour turns dark green of  a forest crown or sapphire if sky opens out for the day and wind stays its presence, unlike yesterday afternoon when zigzags bristled the width eyes could reach, when hail sheered waves, lapsing into cold torrents for hours, where all was outlines again of grey headlands, bleak horizon, the housetop all sound tones of sweeping rain as ocean whites and rewhites and rewhites.

River

Write and rewrite and rewrite [river] unreachable upper reaches where fish and mammal swerve under insect surfaces down spraying falls along thickening currents towards leaf-topped floods birds dip, then the cut banks and stony edges toward bends over flats minuscule bubbles and sky-shining corners feeding roots into shining sky again upward where before falling black fell with fire’s lightness of touch, wondering sometimes with seas rising turn the mouth tidal as waters transport salt upstream then out again with rains tempestuous soothing, then humans contouring an imagined solution to what end as river days turn night and respite and reignite

Forest

Write and rewrite and rewrite [forest] longest forced long into air and into earth it shades and surfaces with cumulus of leaves and sticks, multi-levelled where birds tick off the months of replenishment, only how heat increasing is known to force conditions to a showdown where fire takes hold and sweeps everywhere in sounds of colossal magnitude, speeds of unavoidable catastrophe as all living succumbs to irradiation, falling turmoil buried in forest’s memory, only now we don’t think about heat only a blue breeze, a green canopy a wet walk below such might as forest heightens and reunites and recites  

 

Tomorrow

Let’s face it. Tomorrow has been coming for a few years now. Tomorrow asks unresolved questions for the next-to-last time. It’s pure technicality to say [tomorrow] is repeatedly deferred. It’s repeatedly experienced. Best to be prepared. At dinner I was told that tomorrow never happens. That’s another way of looking at it. Tomorrow, as we find again and again, does not always live up to expectations. Still, we flag our words for tomorrow, as though they were more pressing than today. We expect things to be pretty much all in order. Tomorrow delivers on that promise. Only one more sleep.

 

Tree

Without need of closer inspection trees line up.

Mind enjoys the shapes, the lines of their trunks

Original profusion of their foliage.

Early birds make noises flying between:

Currawongs, wrens… Slopes mown against fire.

Thoughts turn to minutest details hereabouts:

Descendants of rail-sleeper trees, back-fence trees

Textbook branching of leaf-filmed blue-hinted trees

Bark-splintering heights, short-lived florescence

Business-like silken timber ringed-interiors

Flame-bursted flame-endangered giants

About the house from riverside to high ridge,

Mind transformed into stillness and wonder

Upon meditation of green being, growing again.

Photograph: At the back of the house at Wye River in September 2019.

Quote (December)

In my dream the most remarkable set of quotes is being collected. They drift into view and I copy-and-paste them, computer-like, into a box. Even in my dream I know that if I wake the quotes will prove childish, possibly meaningless, but that now they have only to be arranged right to form a stunning poem. The quotes are made not so much of words as colours, or unnamed extraordinary calligraphic shapes, or planes of perception. Some quotes are more a hot December day at Wye River before storm clouds; a face; an old movie. Frustrated arranging, I wake up.

Blackout (September)

September the light will not turn on. It cannot, in the dark. That’s odd. You feel your way by bed and doorframe, couch and switch that will not light, to the 3am widdle. All of Wye River is darkness. Even the light of the boat at the starless horizon has gone. Sound of your water on water assures you have found the middle. Lampposts are out. Hills are black as before settlement and sea sounds in the dark. Generators? Lightning? At breakfast Carol says it was like the old days, when you couldn’t see your hand in front of you.

Erosion (September)

September shines on the work of Men. The engineering feat that lifted Depression is prone to mishap. The Great Ocean Road will lose its outline. ‘Slow’ signs and stop lights emerge past turns, where mishaps are happened upon. Madame performs a halt in her shiny new machine. Cliff fell even unto the guard rails. Fire-razed bracken slopes refuse to reforest. Their slump of earth obliterates macadam, adds new points to the coastline of Australia. Rocks bumble and bounce in freefall bowling. Unwearied, workmen affix geo-vert eco-mat and hexagon wire mesh to ungrassing sludge. Mend clifftops within an inch of lives.

Beach (September)

September stares towards Antarctica: ice shelf breaks, volcano discoveries, sea rises. What is black humour, anyway? Banned from in-flight movies, a staple of Dodgy Alley theatre. Waves lather the beach. Surfers stare from their car-wheels at the chaos of reef: nothing today. Erosion walls relocate towards the caravan park. Affronting the surf live saving club, sandbags hold against tides. Wye River abandons its serpentine exit, cuts to sea the shortest way. Winter and old fires let landslides loose into seaslides. Lapwings swoop the comedians who wander thoughtless across nesting grounds. Waves cover sand repeatedly, like every film you’ve ever seen.