Ink (August)

[Little inky autobiography] Turning out primary school cursive. Desks with empty inkwell holes. August raincloud drawings. Letters every week to someone not seen for decades since. Biro racing across examination paper. Pens perched on pads on Trinity College doors: progenitor of Facebook. ‘King Ink’ at the Astor. Poems of crossings out. Collecting Winsor and Newton bottles. Boxes of nibs in op shops. Old Schools who signed typed documents with fountain pen. After horse riding into Wonnangatta, night sky of ink black. Umpteenth new refill for the library photocopier. Conference notes, shopping lists, post-it reminders. Playing The Ink Spots on YouTube.

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.

Phthalo (August)

Or else, phthalo. The tube of phthalo, dimpled metal, contributes to ‘August Nightfall’. A blob, mixed with white, indicates where winter sun went down beyond Westgarth. Another, traced with black, livens clothes of passengers to left of the floor-to-ceiling canvas. Evening itself, outside Gallery Cyanide, is a not dissimilar shade of phthalo, though rain has left sheen of sapphire on cars and windows. Take this test. Close your eyes so they see a darker shade of blue. Try not to think of phthalo. See, you cannot not think of phthalo. Open again to a gallery of recent artworks, some metal.