Snatches of different languages. I look up

the steps of the Sydney Opera House.

Scattered pockets of tourists climb and run up.

There’s a universal bravado about it all.

Birds of paradise bordering a concrete vaulting,

blown trash whipping at the chain-link fence.

The flora is lush, random and leggy,

limbs smooth as butter-cream stride on by.

Flip-flops slop maintaining a momentum

which travels up the body. Slight girls

in tight skirts drag wedge heels behind

their rucksacks hobbling the posture.

A scene of transience, paradise bordering.

Blown trash whipping at the chain-link fence.

Plaited Patricia sits gawky and awkward:

long legs, short dress, tight bodice, puffed sleeves.

She clasps shiny knees with rough red hands,

swollen fingers catching in fancy laced linen.

Pin-striped legs tucked under his chair,

with bony knees so carefully aligned,

grandfather Crampton’s copper plate fingers

clasp a bone china handle. He lowers his lips

to a porcelain rim. Such Edwardian restraint.

An elegant gesture accomplished with ease.

She cannot do likewise, plaited Patricia,

her fingers scramble to find any purchase

on willow pattern handles. Her efforts slip slop

spooling hot tea over misaligned knees,

down purple calves to her leather tongued shoes.

Fumbling and scrabbling in her dress pocket

miscellaneous crumbs join tea trails and

fine crocheted doilies are caught in the snag.

A tumble down teatime descends to the lawn.

Those pin-striped knees engineer a small turn

and a genteel white head with a weak wan smile

responds to this mishap, with scarcely a nod.

When I wanted to run a home

for stray elephants, my parents

gave me a big book – Wild Animals.

I opened it. Smooth

semi-gloss pages

slipped and slithered

through anxious little fingers,

hundreds of heavy pages.

I picked it up, its heft was great,

and set it splat on a table,

leaned over and placed

my nose right there

into its folded down wings,

closed my eyes,

eased into the jungle,

into a mystery

that has never left me.

I know all the aromas,

I’m expert now,

all the papers, printing inks,

the surface similarities,

the differences, PH values,

antique and azure laid,

bible paper, thin, opaque,

bond or base or clay-coated,

laminate or plain, off-white,

or low opaque to minimise

the show through text.

Add cold-set

lithographic ink,

head-set, sheetset or web offset.

And now my son,

via Gunter Grass and Gerhard Steidl,

Robert Frank and Tony Chamber’s

Wallpaper,

has sent a birthday gift:

a bottle in a book, a book in a bottle:

Paper Passion – sniff me!

I have known death

have been close to it

watched a man die

heard my own death

whisper in the room

I am fifty-eight

each year of me

has seen violent death

in the name of causes

for this regime that power

to start something

end something

remember something

these detached deaths down the ages

did not touch me at my core

I did not know their smell

fragrance of oils that seep

from skin and hair

I did not know their voice

or know their breathing

I did not wave them off

to war to work to shop to play

I did not properly love them

these deaths will churn

in the loop of time

that holds the Earth

I will suck molecules

that held their last breath

I will feel their currents

timeless waves of lost

our carbon converging

in footprints of gone

I could not properly love them

Pat’s Blog

 

How can I explain,
thirty years of hole
now filled, like an electric light
in a sea-storm of cyan
salt and introspective madness.

How can I portray
red boot-lace nerves
that weep, now relaxed after
a life of brass piano-string tension
and grating humming burning.

How can I convey nothing,
nothingness,
blackness,
blackness,
hole, and
hole,
except by something
lovely and hot, melting, flying,
rays like arms of fire that stretch
and connect and feel, caress,
weep, and love.

Dun fronds of undulating seaweed

mimic each subtle pulse of current

along endlessly repeated branches,

radial ribbons that taper

to barely visible, barely tangible,

diaphanous feathers of nerve-wires.

Compacted miles of forest fungus

riddle the woodland soil,

gauze-silken nets of subterranean fern

rippling with each wave of loam-warmth,

feeding off the trees, feeding the trees,

finest tendril-tips defying the senses.

But sea creatures hear the susurrus of the sea-sorrel;

earth denizens hear the secret sigh of the saprophyte.

Ted’s blog

In dark caves the hand draws floating creatures

with finger-paint grace and smoky pigment:

half is ground quartz and manganese dioxide,

half is calcium phosphate, pestle-powder

remains of the beasts’ own bones and blood.

In the Paris Jardin des Plantes sits Nabokov’s ape,

trained and coaxed month on month on year

to recognise images and to use the pencil:

free at last with blank paper and charcoal

he immediately sketches the bars of his cage.

All these symphonies, these ballads, sculptures,

tragedies, comedies, dances, films, poems,

string quartets, paintings, novels, songs:

from fecund compost of our own bones and bars

creation springs, cage defined and marrow-deep.

http://www.maintenantman.wordpress.com

He’d fashioned two love tokens

and placed them by the bed before he left.

I saw the gleam reflected in those fireballs

as I turned to the morning light, four

tiny globes on the table. I stretched out

to stroke the mercurial forms suspended

on silver lace bobbins, lifting the finials

to my tongue, rotating them gently

in my mouth, lips encasing, caressing

their compressed Jurassic warmth.

Then held the crook, letting them swing,

their slight comforting, reassuring.

The combined weight was a gentle pull

on my lobes, the swing reassuring.

I noticed the inky refractions

whenever I lay them in my palms.

In summer the globes swung untrammelled

on their finialled shafts. In cold weather

and muffled against the numbing cold

of a rural parish church concert,

I left with shoulders hunched, shuffling

through the congregation to the welcome

night crunch and smell of gravel and privet.

Unmuffling later I searched in vain

for the slight my one lobe missed.

Years later I roll the one remaining jet

in my hand and let my lips close again

over dark warmth and cool silver before

once more replacing it in the typesetter’s

shelves alongside other singles.