Louvres

I opened the door in my face
— Pete Brown

The sky, October,
and rain at last
laying the dust of a building site
down the road.
Echolalia, the split
of tongues, sublunary things
worry me,
a man without socks
‘walking’,
as Richard Thompson,

‘through a wasted land’

You love it and have to destroy it. Palimpsest: each a shadow of the one before, the bottles, the tins, the rubber thongs washed ashore from the French island. A faith in things restored, each given their place on the shelves, visible from a dusty couch. You light the torch and hand it on as rain washes grit away from the suburbs

The constant rearrangement of furniture
relativities, what lives with you
and what you do without sinks back
under the reshaping atmospheres the albums
uncaptioned daring a narrative
where you start     from there a constant shift
a random play function, boxes of china
sent off to the charity store
things no one wants the calm
late afternoon light teetering vee
of a pigeon caught on an updraft

Red November, Poincianas fan low
over the water, sheets of rain
from the northeast blow upward
through louvres. In the courtyard
a pond's surface fractures, yellow flowers
drop from trees three pigeons roost
on a deck umbrella as the sky veers dark.
A collect of nominals: this, this,
this, with which there can be no argument.

The art of mixing ochre, a series of patient filters          Bea Maddock
then the map, a shoreline limned
pale close features, darker distance,
often only a thin line, veneer of settlement
typed names in small print, voices
hung in the air. A lump in the text
whitens, a gouge forms a reservoir
on this periphery done from radials
assuming a centre. These estimated heights
serve to return land once taken;
lend a new register where walls of a gallery
can turn a whole State inside out
as we perambulate across its empty core.

Where do they go, these people
with shopping baskets and scratch tickets
perambulating under the canopy in light rain
the door of the dress shop opened, a mat
placed on the paving and a trolley
hung with price reductions wheeled
to the entrance. Letters circulate,
wires and birds pass through the thin air
darkening above the awnings. What hope
is there for these people.

Boredom as self-recognition (Schopenhauer). As a kind of authenticity in an age of appropriation. When déjà vu incorporates déjà vu. You have to name those boats on the river; find words to describe the pattern of water surfaces, the variation of clouds, shoppers moving according to plan down the Mall. On a tape I can hear my own voice, aged five, reciting segments from a school play. But I am now a different organism: not ‘the author’ of those books, a cursor moving slowly down a page.

Painted-over windows. What history there
amid the dust from a site up the road;
the solid structure of early twentieth-century
factories, their sawtooths and rusted ventilators,
the very idea of purpose building
anachronistic? Attach here
a history of nostalgia. As though even the air
could be replicated, that history is not
more than we can be aware of now
afloat on this current, a brahmin kite
viewing the before and after of the river.

Along the hallway a face, walking,
illuminated by the glow of a portable computer.
It is a world of epiphany
but where do we take it? Those odd flickerings
at the edge of perception, former inhabitants
from some other completely different set of
circumstances, yes, but also imaginations,
dimensions patterns of light, sequences
of ones and zeros, a different world
from that in which, as the light in the room fades,
we are introduced to the aether
by the sound of a marimba.

I had been silent for six years unaware that to be the same is to be different. I wanted to read unwritten work, absorb influences which did not yet exist. Returning to former sources six years later they are those works, those influences.

Cockatoo and wheel screech converge.
An empty chair faces the empyrean
out over the balcony, the rumble of a street:
realism. The damp paddocks
over the river, long mast of a TV aerial
corrosions and unaccountable objects
across a curved roof. The distant suburb
lights up slowly, its main street
climbs a ridge, long dark shape of a primary school
its memory-layer of brick, chalked images
and basketball nets hung over asphalt.

White shapes on a wooden pier
resolve into children they could
have been pelicans for one moment.
Voices from a garden hard to locate
diffract over a short space from a bench
where everything dissolves into the present.
Up on the hill over Hamilton, flags
on a mock manor preside over light
which falls on the flood plain around Bulimba.

Philosophy and poetry, runs the weekend news item, are products of long walks (where it can be possible to have them). Is it the movement or the vista? That intently observed, however small and fragile, or the sweep which may be for the historians. A hand-held camera juggled, now pointing at the sky, now the sturdy pair of boots. And it ends up being read by the grammar that holds it together, the sense of a sentence which may be for life. Writing: the product of sentenced beings, knowing and known. As the moon in the water.

What place poetry in a world of commodities? Is it possible to make a ‘serious portrait of my times’ when the objects I describe will not remain as collateral. Only the geology of this river basin, the paths of its inhabitants obscured by the vagaries of ‘lifestyle’. That flood of 1974 released mangroves onto new silt. It's remembered by posts registering the high water mark. Richard Tipping's half-submerged FLOOD at the performing arts museum. But even the houses now mock sturdily their progenitors: ‘colonials’ with insulated walls. Should poetry feign continuities like these buildings do?

Why should I, who have lived in this country all my life, suddenly feel myself an exile in a distant province? All day and all night the wires and the air itself are galvanized. Information presses upon us. Capital is all mimicry, but with no original; all quotation without source. So these texts might echo those of a distant youth, or those of some complete other out beyond the coulisses of trees and architectures, of ideas floating above the river.

Meat ants trail across a rotten bench plank,
red circle under the plane of a poinciana
the veldt on a river bend. Mississippi steamboat
turning upstream a ‘schoolies’ disco
(post-examinations) seems top heavy
— the DJ deck. Downriver a brass band
plays something in the vicinity of Dowland
from the park rotunda, heard as far
back as the limbless soldiers' bowling green.

A rusted metal door with porthole                Leah King-Smith
down about water level, below the concrete piers
a set of steps to the wet rocks, silt,
probes of mangrove. Up one level
dismantled relics of a turbine, streaked
walls and lines of pipe, large circular openings.
Over this a layering, seated figure
with hands clasped above the head, green
fernlike growths over wall stains and reinforced
piers, the figure in the central of three bays
— that history could be a succession of discolourings
and erasures, of rust and biological cultures
through which the invisible might of a sudden
heighten, apt condensation risen
from a bath of chemicals.

The bedroom ceiling, a distant parallelogram,
sprinkler system as two stars, milky
at dawn from a concealed skylight.

The corner lamp V-shaped like a cocktail glass

water-trickle down internal piping
in the otherwise silence

lights on the opposite hill
momentarily black out then resurge, except
there seem fewer orange now than white.

Click of a frog, some pond at the back
of the neighbour nursery. A glimmer,

hand-held light, tent-shaped
near the river bank

the tracking blink
of aircraft at altitude heading south.

Shipwreck:                         Jennifer Marshall
black woodcut shapes
on aniline, engulfed by colour
spread over the grooves,
surface textures
the material itself,
fine Japanese paper
hung as a scroll a little over a metre

down the walls of a hidden gallery
in the suburbs of a provincial city

where walking under water remains a possibility.

A cable breaks and communication is cut off, or hangs, at least, from ganglia partially severed. The line back to poetry a possibility still, but remote once the disguises are removed. Still, the rattle, the hint of those sounds and the world they portend. Trying to locate a source somewhere inside the pipes of a large church organ: that blast of air, of constant traffic. And the impossibility of grasping direction.

Red halo over Balmoral, strangely inept
title of a hill-suburb, its lack of distinction
save a minimal altitude; enough
for a view of the not so distant city
beyond New Farm, once market gardens and
shipping terminals; Kangaroo Point, sand and mud
till the Story Bridge tied it to Fortitude Valley.
Apartments and plazas follow the river,
appear as though generated overnight. History
beyond the geological is hard to place
in this vicinity, is felt only at night,
the black river its asteroid belt.

Telephone booth lit up in the surrounding dark on an angle below as in Stewart MacFarlane's painting; it's empty, but seen as a film shot, hints at the 1940s.

The surface of a river is only one surface                 Lin Onus
daylight inverts the trees
the fish are inscribed with maps.
The reflections of blue could be realism
but it's realism void of referent: it's style,
another layer another assortment of lights
reached through to touch something which isn't there.
The fish memorialise a place we can only glimpse
as though our world were formed of postcards.
They hang somewhere outside all of this.

Weeks of rain have laid the dust
on the building sites down the road,
girders and cement blocks shaped day-by-day
as unremarkable apartments footpaths
lead nowhere in particular. On the corner
a lawn has recently materialised
and around into Merthyr Rd sharp whistles
from a poinciana tree locate a dangling oriole
far to the south of its usual course.

Marks on paper, gradations on screen
as ephemeral as the factory light oscillating
upside down in the river: it's there every night
cut by the wake of ferries, resuming
its shape, though this itself is illusion,
there is no permanent, stable form for this
trick of sight. As words hedge
after intent or slant each time they're placed
— even in print meaning shifts,
we are caught by different angles every time.

‘It is difficult now to speak of poetry.’ My silent habitation, paintings, furniture and books; the dialogue between, my own. This word-hoard otherwise lacks a centre, is flotsam on no certain tide.

The past is not such a repository of dread. The forgotten may be benign and the fears of one generation lapse to curiosity for the next. Once the pieces are assembled everything is understood. A cryptogram may be the clearest means to an end. The house of violence stilled becomes a monochrome world. The image that tracks you may not turn to a set of rails down which you must hurtle. The horizon opens up, smoke in the distance is no premonition nor forgetfulness an unmovable stain.

The island goes Tuscan, forest dug up
to build a nature reserve, the bridge
two lanes to rattle across on the way
to your history, a family's dark secrets
which turn out benign two generations later.
My grandfather, a violent man who made my uncle
line up all the pebbles in the driveway;
threw him out of the house aged nine
with two shillings; then went mad
and died in an asylum, the result of
‘insulin therapy’ — but that was in 1938. Funny
the past should hover over these clear channels
this drive through brightness, an hour
out of town.

How much of it is the by-product
of parent's fears, incursions from a world
hard now to comprehend, a different set
of rules from those that now toss us.
Even the minutiae are different, atmospheres
like those of movies; a gentle wind
across the river may be as insidious. You throw
your words together, but you are aware
of transiencies and unable to use
tricks of the populists. Just leave these pieces out
to dry in the air: the rattling flags
that will no longer hurt you.

Heavy peppercorn scent in late
November heat outside the Gallery
— redolence — a breeze
up the river, the city in its haze
across Victoria Bridge, the Town Hall
showing the work of an artist
imprisoned in mythology.

Mind has a shape. But the shape of the mind is not determined by mythical templates. The surrealists escaped from the detention centre of naturalism into the high-security prison of mythography.

Air circulates through the latticed wharf
as the brown river laps and bubbles underneath.
A small goanna crosses the path
lifting itself from the hot surface.
Mangroves drag against the current, out
from the tidal rocks.

An improbable group of young demonstrators at the Literary Festival want to get rid of poetry. They complain about having to read anything that is old, that poetry itself is perverse, gives people strange ideas and ruins their career prospects. I too once wanted poetry banned from schools, but for the sake of the art itself rather than the uncorrupted genius of the individual. I'm touched though, by their belief: that poetry could be dangerous.

I don't know what Stephen Spender was thinking of when he compared the pylons to ‘nude giant girls with no secrets’. There are two of them here, at Newstead and Bulimba, lines sagging across the river between. At Bulimba they remain visible for a while on tall concrete poles over the rise to the army barracks. At Newstead they go to ground in one of those inauspicious brick sheds, a weed overgrown stretch of land backing up to an old gasometer. These relics of industry will soon disappear (or live on, ghosted, a twenty-first century memory garden neatly planted amid medium-rise and shopping malls).

The apartment, shaped
as a euphonium
into the wrong end of which
butcher birds sing
at 5 a.m.
the inescapable light
descends as
an apotheosis.

Dürer's ‘Melancholia’, the sharpness of its geometries. A lion asleep amid regular solids: ‘golf balls of insomnia’? The weather overhead shifts and changes; its light alters the reality of all things. Against which shapes persist, obsessive and valedictory. Who is the mortal being observing all this? And what are all those shafts of peripheral light?

A pure inscription
of light, moving downriver
erases itself, no time
for the handle of names, dates,
the registration of what passes for fact

From water so foul
fish still can jump
a shore of disintegrating ply
a palm tree, washed
to these rocks from somewhere.
The glare, through skylights
from the windows of warehouses

Charles Olson spoke of a nation of nothing but poetry. But why stop at the boundary? Because poetry exists outside the boundary, it is the peripheral. Poetry is the original cultural study absorbing all the data a grand sweep obscures. A dust of pollen on the page alters the speed of writing. Is this what Olson meant by breath? Book title: poetry and asthma.

The embodiment of knowledge. Words on trade routes, in collision. Chasing the phenomenon of evening light, pollen released from the page. Figures along the banks of the river, an old gas tower, rowing clubs, gaps in the mangrove. The idea of a city, rising beyond the concrete plant, its broken wharves. Weather signals lit up already over the MLC building.

Sunsets and electrical storms                Mostyn Bramley-Moore
pass over the water
en route to a new continent.
Water itself: iridescent layers
not one stable reality but
reflection on reflection,
depth on depth,
a myth of surface — the painting
one of many spaces before which
figures shift, shading, complicating,
moving on. This part of the planet
is cities, storms, roofs aloft in turbulence.
A map is only one layer of it.

Light through melaleuca, no shadow.
Old books, the certainties decades past

up the street which reminds of a country town:
closed shopfronts, verandah posts,

incessant heat; a sense of precariousness.
Its business world, flimsy, could collapse

as figs root up pavement, clothes disintegrate.
The body moves through this, tilts

into the shimmering atmosphere.