Yellow (August)

[Little autobiography in yellow] Early memory: sheep fields near Ballendella. Childhood beach cricket at Queenscliff. Easter vestments and goldfoil eggs. ‘Mellow Yellow’ by Donovan. Wattle in August. School house: Barnett, yellow stripe in tie. Teenage rage poems about Vincent’s sunflowers. Bizarre university days: Wallace-Crabbe playing Malvolio in “yellow stockings”. Favourite sweet of a first love: honey bears. Ganja of lost weekends. Losing a Grand Final to the Tigers. Cataloguing gilt-spined 16^th-century Jesuitica. First reading Proust’s “little patch of yellow wall.” After the Iron Curtain, visiting goldleaf  Prague. ‘Yellow’ by Coldplay. Circular poems about currawongs’ eyes. My daughter’s sunbright finger painting.

Yellow (January)

Hypotheses hypotheses: epilepsy, bipolar, porphyria, lead poisoning, syphilis, sunstroke... Meaning? Yellow was his favourite colour. No one asked him for a profile. He didn’t share breakfast with movie stars. Movies? It’s commonplace to say yellow surged after he went south. Twisted sunflowers, frenzied wheatfields, multi-spectacle galaxies. His colleague Gauguin was soft on yellow, fleshing out light. He himself ate paint. His yellow walked into the town square from dark corridors. Men played boule, outside the frame. He never painted group scenes. All his money went on materials. Even January blazed colour. At crunchtime he wasn’t about to dial yellow cabs.

Yellow (August)

For Miss B.

Rare weekend cars in lamppost-lit side streets and four o’clock insomniacs at their frames of melancholia and the first plane coming home with Europe doing up its seatbelt for landing chance to see, at a minute’s break in dark amorphousness, the thinnest new curve of our single satellite.

The winter must be long and cold, not to mention getting to school or just getting out of bed, and the domestic duties we turn into distractions that must forestall working in the garden, before one morning stepping out and even then it’s late as eight, someone notices the native show its colour spread over every extremity of its being.

Away all day behind a moving mountain of cloud, it suddenly burnishes windows and rooftops, turns freeways into rivers of gold, about three in the afternoon; cold as the suburb may be a glow touches the eye, before new mountains of rain close it down again.

Dandenong Dutch packet bulbs did not budge last year, did not try, that ripple along the edges and waver, bow their bowls and it is the only thing when they come in sight, reminder of an England our ancestors eulogized.

Shutting down the computer and its ten thousand micro-click boxes, its cast of false selfs, a cursor here and a dozen dislikes there, is time to revisit in quiet corridor an image of rest: saint of groundedness, basis of union, it sends where it will the true self.

Head cold and throat rack and sleeplessness send him to the urine-fed tree, to pluck, even in winter, its sunshine shape, its soothing scent, its healthful bitter liquid, its astringent medicine, its vitality to the eye sockets, its straightening of the head.

Under the cone of light it spreads, every imaginable story comes to light, her adventure with dragons and his poem going through purgatory and her browse of the latest papered-over news, when otherwise the room is brown and the passages grey and outside is black as black, without a moon or stars to speak of.