Window on the 370

Urban ablution

Riding home the other night, I passed a man on Redfern street squared up to a shop door. It was very late and there was no one else around. His belt was undone and his pants were loose at the rear. A stream of urine was hosing out from his front side, drenching the lower part of the door and running down frothily past his shoes to the gutter. I couldn't help but admire the sheer animalism of the situation. Bladder to brain: GO. Brain to hands: GO.

(I think he might've had a couple.)

Mondrian Jellyfish

m
.
j
.

Falling gracefully

A reprisal of Window on the 461 II

Window on the 438 II

Window on the 438 I

But
t
h
e
real
p
r
o
b
l
e
m
with
t
h
i
s
man
Is he says he can't when he can.

(From Sitting on a Fence - The Housemartins.)

Endeavouring to find the right words II

"Captain?"

"..."

Preternatural public transport

What are you looking at, she asked.

A window. But not at it. We're on the bus, so I'm clearly looking through it. But I mean the window's in me, and together we're checking out what's going on outside. In the street.

What do you see?

Oh, that question is less philosophical than you might think. Crowds. Cars. Neon lights. Mashed paper. Shop front awnings. Shoes. A kaleidoscope of hoods and hands. The city is lively tonight, don't you think?

(Her stop had come.)

Window on the 399

Whatever happened to the leftover lamb?

"For me, true perfection is a result of passion, understanding and the willingness to transform lives," Dr Chris Brown (veterinarian).

"Nala [a dog] and the Purina One team agree."

This quote appeared in an advertisement for pet food.

Car's Law coffee mishap

(Aketon is ...?)

A fragment of John Kinsella's Armour (on poems without politics ...?)

From the OED: A stuffed jacket or jerkin, at first of quilted cotton, worn under the mail; also, in later times, a jacket of leather or other material plated with mail.

Window on the 461 II

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o
o

Trans parent

This window, whose otherwise dull life was brightened by the occasional court jester appearance at kids' parties, ended it all by leaping through a window. IRONIC huh! (He was a single father of three.)

Window on the 461 I

Finding yourself in a Morandi still life

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Giorgio Morandi's Still life, 1960 was painted four years before his death.

The Mundanity of Reconstruction

Mundanity (from the OED).

1. The quality or fact of belonging to the world; worldliness. obs.

2. The quality of being in vogue; fashionableness. rare.

3. The quality or fact of being commonplace, trivial, or ordinary. Also: that which is commonplace; a humdrum thing, a tedious necessity.

Inundation

Passing

We walked on cold ground
Heavy with rain
Unspoiled yet
By night
Or the nomads
Who pass through here

We came to a fire
Straining to see
Its long
Loosely offered
Curlicue tongues
Flare out
Amongst the swollen brush
Lifting and parting
And reforming fiendishly
Into places beyond the embered lair
Or the gypsy pilgrims
Whose tambourine capering
It shadowed

We unwrapped each other
In a cradle of leaves
Out of view til morning
Til our passing
Could be weightless again
Of the temptation
Of the surrender
Printed like veins on our skin

Fragment

A Definite Article

Spider Window

A Tullamarine Factory

Apprenticed in shades of pink
But not for them
This headful of
Blood moons
And silted river beds

Little grey animals
Infested the factory
Bolder the closer they came
To the colour guns
And for a time
My only means of survival

But not for them either
That eventually I retired
Bought a chair
And fashioned while compos
Spherical objects
From moist sand
For the markets

Going Down

Endeavouring to find the right words I

By coincidence, the sailor quoting John Donne was the great poet's namesake. The conversation continued ...

"Yes."

"And you reckon your fancy words'll help?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"They'll make this perilous predicament seem less real. That is to say ... less real."

"You're an idiot."

"Yes Captain."

"Who hired you?"

"You did."

"So I'm an idiot?"

"Captain?"

"Who hired you?"

(Pointing towards the wave) "Fate, sir."

Beth's Window

After a clean up, no one expected to be able to see more clearly. (Though some new geometry did emerge.)

Freedom Ride.

A woman on the bus this morning was shouting into her mobile that she was "a free agent." That her divorce was now, finally, "legit." This followed a cheerful conversation with her mother, from whom she extracted a full description of her soon-to-be-consumed evening meal, item by side-saladed item.

Except for the volume, I thought, fair enough. She's unshackled. Loved. Evidently, she's happy.

And yet I was pleased when my stop came. The sun had just broken free from the clouds after days of diffusion and greyness.

Woman Posing for a Photograph II

The painting is Norham Castle, Sunrise by Joseph William Turner c.1835.

Smoke

Spooky Ship

These are the stanzas in Part III of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner where a spooky cage-like ship advances towards the old seafarer and his crew. I was quite unsettled after reading them.

Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is Death that Woman's mate?

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.

The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
"The game is done! I've won! I've won!"
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.

Woman Posing for a Photograph I

Matinee

Shocked by the light
My lungs
Fold over themselves
For a lick of air -
Glistening slugs
Lapped together
In a cage

We have some business
Down on the line
Says the man with a backwards smile
You, old son, took
The wrong out

My weakness is my mouth
An opening and closing
Toad fish vessel
From which no sound
Can come

Not even a last squeak
To correct his sentence,
To say "turn"
Before unrolling my arms
And dropping my head
Theatrically to the road

Precipitate Fancies

Shapeskis II

The building in this picture was extracted from a photograph (dated 1968) in the Wolfgang Sievers Collection at the State Library of Victoria. It is Accountants House, headquarters of the Australian Society of Accountants, 49 Exhibition Street, Melbourne.


(Note that the blinds are drawn on the ground floor.)

Shapeskis I

These shapes were taken from Wassily Kandinsky's painting Several Circles (1926)

Revolting Fleas

Step

Reading about the 'elimination step'
I understand it's philosophical
Or natural
As far as these things go

After the Lady of Shalott
In a spare room
Any isolation begins
With mirrors and longing

And just as she wove
New temperatures
To fill her time
I sit here now
At the top of a long stair
Believing my Lancelot is a dupe
That his step
Were its force known
Would proceed lifetimes
Out of view

Genetic Paint III

Control

A woman on a motorcycle is waving to a boy standing several hundred meters from her on the roadside. She is travelling at high speed, roaring towards him. The boy is springing up and down on his tippy toes returning her wave with both arms, an action which sends his whole body into delighted gyrations. Her waving is enthusiastic too, yet jerky because of the wind whooshing over her.

She passes the boy and suddenly catches something. The road.

Her waving stops as she snaps her head forward and tightens her grip on the handlebars. The boy doesn't notice anything unusual in her behaviour, however, and keeps waving.

A little way down the road, the motorcycle begins to judder and skip from side to side on the bitumen, kicking sharply at its surface.

The woman is losing control.

I Held You in the Square (Ben Okri, 1986)

I held you in the square
And felt the evening
Re-order itself around
Your smile.

The dreams I could never touch
Felt like your body.
Your gentleness made the
Night soft.

And even if we didn't know
Where we were going,
Nor what street to take
Or what bench to sit on
What chambers awaited
That would deliver us our
Naked joy,
I could feel in your spirit
The restlessness for a journey
Whose beauty lies
In the arriving moment
Of each desire.

Holding you in the evening square,
I sealed a dream
With your smile as the secret pact.