almost done with yet another Monday

The New Yorker ... antidote for any Monday

And like the women

If I tell you that I looked
in long-forgotten places
where a man may hide
… an ordinary man
lost (perhaps) …
and there
found nothing I could recognise
nor anyone who looked
familiar
nor held a map to plan a route
nor pointed out
the way a man who’s lost
might find himself
back on the path
he thought he took
(a long, long time ago)
would you then pity me
or laugh
and send me on my way
and like the women known to me
and men like me,
turn impatiently to say
that is not it;
that is not what I meant, at all?

As if in a mirror

We Are Many

Of the many men whom I am, whom we are,
I cannot settle on a single one.
They are lost to me under the cover of clothing
They have departed for another city.

When everything seems to be set
to show me off as a man of intelligence,
the fool I keep concealed on my person
takes over my talk and occupies my mouth.

On other occasions, I am dozing in the midst
of people of some distinction,
and when I summon my courageous self,
a coward completely unknown to me
swaddles my poor skeleton
in a thousand tiny reservations.

When a stately home bursts into flames,
instead of the fireman I summon,
an arsonist bursts on the scene,
and he is I. There is nothing I can do.
What must I do to distinguish myself?
How can I put myself together?

All the books I read
lionize dazzling hero figures,
brimming with self-assurance.
I die with envy of them;
and, in films where bullets fly on the wind,
I am left in envy of the cowboys,
left admiring even the horses.

But when I call upon my DASHING BEING,
out comes the same OLD LAZY SELF,
and so I never know just WHO I AM,
nor how many I am, nor WHO WE WILL BE BEING.
I would like to be able to touch a bell
and call up my real self, the truly me,
because if I really need my proper self,
I must not allow myself to disappear.

While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.
I should like to see if the same thing happens
to other people as it does to me,
to see if as many people are as I am,
and if they seem the same way to themselves.
When this problem has been thoroughly explored,
I am going to school myself so well in things
that, when I try to explain my problems,
I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.

Pablo Neruda

Archibald Prize 08

My top four

Paul Ryan: Peter Booth with Cuban .......... James Cochran: Akira ................ Neil Evans: Blue days, black nights

Yi Wang: Long Hair

Art Gallery of NSW

Full

I have killed a naked man, I said

A naked man I met and killed
because his naked truth affronted me;
affronts me still, and men like me
who seldom travel naked
across this brooding land,
where it is best to ask
no questions of such naked men
and better yet to act pre-emptively
in self-defence
of all that’s good and true
in this,
our honest land,
where we are free
to call a spade a spade
and where we understand the danger
of naked men we meet
somewhere on the road
from this place
to that place
where every man, for all we know,
may wander naked. But not here,
not in this great land
where we need never say
I killed a naked man. Instead,
we speak of justice done
and of our right
because we know this much for sure:
From wherever you may be (naked or not)
if your last good eye offends thee, pluck it out.

Version 2 (see Looking for a Samaritan)

I am in need of music

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

Elizabeth Bishop

Welcome home Susi

Lion dancers resting,
Chinese New Year, Shanghai

Looking for a Samaritan

I have killed a naked man, I said.
A naked man I met and killed
perhaps because his naked truth affronted me,
affronts me still, and men like me
who seldom travel naked
across this brooding land
where it is best
to ask no questions of such naked men
and better yet to act pre-emptively
in self-defence
of all that’s good and true
in this, our honest land,
where we are free
to call a spade
a spade
and where we understand the danger
of naked men we meet
somewhere on the road
from this place to that place
where every man, for all we know,
may wander naked.
But not here,
not in this great land
where we need never say
I killed a naked man. Instead,
we speak of justice done
and of our right
because we know this much for sure:

From wherever you may be (naked or not)
if your last good eye offends thee, pluck it out.


More or less, the first draft of my submission to this month's Guardian poetry workshop

good question

Hubris rather than the Ides did it

Vincenzo Camuccini: The Death of Caeser

10,000 BC

$75 Million (US) to make one of the most boring, undramatic movies you could [not] hope to see. And yet, it took $35.7 Million at the US box office in its opening weekend. Go figure.

Craig Raine on T S Eliot

Poetry is written out of the true self, in all its complexity, in all its saving incoherence, its authentic internal contradictions, its existential candour, a self utterly remote from the self deduced by the world, the glib caricature we recognise reflected in the eyes of others, "eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase".

Read the article in The Guardian

Obviously

Steeper than it looks

One hour from Dubbo

Ode to a strip of tarmac adjacent to a country road

There is almost nothing to commend
this isolated strip
of baking tarmac;
almost nothing
save the concrete slab
with six steel polls
of palest green
erected to support
the corrugated roof (the regulation green)
shading two
green benches
either side
of a green table
speckled with dry bird shit.

But it is here,
in this,
the most unlikely spot on Earth,
we find the poetry that matters:
silent when it needs to be
(or not)
it reads itself out loud
more as an act of confirmation
than a question
and more,
much more than words can say
or those same words upon the page could testify,
about the man and woman
we may be

travelling together
for a short time
on a long journey
beneath a burning sun in a blue sky
(interrupted helpfully
by regimented clouds)
we see,
paused by the roadside,
not the drab conformity
of an appropriately authorised
resting place
for weary travellers or needy smokers
but a space for dreamers
(not entirely lost) along the way.

Arabella

A night at the Opera with Spike. Delightful singing, especially by Cheryl Barker as Arabella. When she sang "I will give myself to you, for eternity" there could not have been a dry eye in the house. I would have wept like a baby myself but I am, as we know, a Scottish Presbyterian and we FROWN on such lack of control. Bob Carr, former Premier of NSW, came across at the interval for a chat about the singing, his new book and our association (brief) with Christopher Reeve.

The lights around the harbour, reflecting off the water and the wet pavements on the stroll back to the van, gave the whole area a magical appearance. The distant lightening, devoid of any sound of thunder, added something indescribable by me although Spike invented a word for the effect: tremulations. Works for me.

From Sharon, who thought I would like it

Conversation

The tumult in the heart
keeps asking questions.
And then it stops and undertakes to answer
in the same tone of voice.
No one could tell the difference.

Uninnocent, these conversations start,
and then engage the senses,
only half-meaning to.
And then there is no choice,
and then there is no sense;

until a name
and all its connotation are the same.

Elizabeth Bishop

Happy Birthday Susi

The other world

Standing in the night
beneath the belt
of Orion,
counting the points
of the Southern Cross;
you listened to me,
speaking endlessly
on the phone,
describing the effects of pupils dilating
(which takes twenty minutes)

as if I was revealing some insight
experience had not given to you.

We shared the Milky Way
and in that moment
stood together
regardless of the miles
(or should it be kilometres)
forgetful of the laws of physics,
careless
of this:
the other world
in which we both must live.