Sunday Sunday

A Sunday resolution. Just because Grizelda is still away does not mean I am allowed to eat ice cream for breakfast. Beans. Beans and toast, this is my Sunday resolution and may it be as boring for you as it was for me.

In other news have a read of this unbelievably awful and biased review of a book of poetry. I admit it might not be his best work but I have never read another review where the personal life of the poet was so transparently judged and attacked. I would have been much more interested in a straight review that examined only the work itself and leaves aside any question of the man's integrity for a different article. 

My opinion on the matter of the Poet and his private life is still being formed, I predict it will be another ten years before it arrives fully formed and ready for dispatch.

First song

The melody came like a wave. The sound heightens and melds all experienced incidents from the shock and slap of a forward moving foot taking the full weight of a man to the lurch and swing of a shoulder joint as an arm travels forwards, loose fingers wanting always to be the first extremities to move into a new space. Breath and lung-bottoms contrive to engineer the whole chest to receive and reject and receive and reject nothing tangible to the naked eye. The sky wheels up and pulls down above everything like a hood and there is the wind. The unnamed wind of London St, Enmore New South Wales, rilling up and down the false dawn hill for reasons not one of the residents properly understands, except him.

False dawn was transformed for two minutes. All parts of him moved together in symphony, fingers, heels, heart, thought, breath and he crested the hill before the song wound down. He turned the corner into shadows under shop-awnings and gained momentum as his body understood he was no longer climbing but walking on flat ground.

The song concluded in one golden burst of resolution and he found his parts disconnecting their psychic union and resuming ordinary operations of holding coins for the bus, manufacturing saliva and planning out the first work tasks of the morning. He more clearly remembers coming back into himself, the dissolving and dissolution of a golden two minute experience than the walking moment itself.

What kind of magic spell to use?

One that completes all work in automated fast motion, similar to the dancing mops but with a successful outcome. Now, if you will excuse me I shall begin.

Lessons in architecture

I have made here another fort of pillows and sea-green bedsheets and that hand stitched quilt from my mother. Volumes of poetry scattered like driftwood. Outside all is ocean and my newspaper on the doorstep pulped in the deluge. I have forgone tea for hot chocolate and the low echo of Maria Callas on the record player. The kitchen floor is a vast and saltless ocean so desperate is the rain to be warm in here with me it has found ways to begin. The dining room ceiling, the bathroom window, underneath doors and windows cold wet fingers clamour for the bare soles of my feet but I am here in my fortress warm and dry.

Soon I will forage for eggs and toast. First I will imagine room by room by the empty house with its echoing arias and the cat perched in the library windowsill noting the rising water and the pale weak sun. Room by room my mind will wander in silence in front of my feet. All the hung curtains breathe and flare making that one long day up ladders worthwhile. This house instructs me in ways of being.

Taking care of

Clattering out of the exit of a fifty floor office tower after 7pm I found myself on the receiving end of a few sympathetic smiles. I was weighed down with folders and documents*, just like the besuited sympathetic smilers. I felt a small burst of collegiate warmth and kinship as I struggled to the nearest bus stop.

I stared up at the endless rows of office towers and listened to the small concrete echo of traffic and hard-soled shoes. I wondered if I could do this every day. So powerful was the feeling of kinship and collaborative human struggle I got carried away in a fantasy of owning a wardrobe full of business dresses, of rising early every day to brush my hair and travel clean and groomed right into the heart of the city. Then I realised I was at the wrong bus stop and my red shoes were old and scuffed and my anchor broach was ridiculously out of place and my office was not in one of those towers but in an almost condemned building in the back corner of a university.

I achieved a new limbo in that moment. I felt simultaneously part of the churning machinations of the city but also free. It was probably just a case of geography.



*Almost all of them were legitimate work documents and books, only two of the books were poetry and only read one of them during the meeting.

Today there was only song