Snapshots August 17, 2005
I'm impatient today,
wasting hours with trivial pursuits.
Tomorrow is the funeral
and yesterday was his death.
His wife can stop
saying 'it's unfair'
and 'we'll keep going',
his infant daughters
can stop crying because
Daddy's too sick to hold them.
His father knows the truth -
there is no hope now.
His brothers organise
the rosary, the requiem,
the funeral, the wake ...
When all the business of death
is put away until next time,
they will cry, privately,
by themselves.
His little girls will get
too many presents on
their next birthday,
and their mother will
always cry on occasion.
But a young boy still
runs in my mind, stops
and looks at me with
his cheeky smile,
always with
a big green apple,
half eaten, in his hand.
(for my nephew Adrian Churack)
Andrew Burke
***
quick snap at the border
lines drawn
up to & stopped there
where laws & power
cite them into being
'two and a half days'
or two & a half lifetimes
the close but not the quick
ness of such perusal
so much of what crosses
cross & fustian these days
nights drawn even closer
dilated pupils learn what
an agreement to bet on
or against the line
where whatever gets across
it's only money lonely money only
Douglas Barbour
Wednesday August 17 2005
***
The boxwood hedge
In the morning dampness
Glistening with grass spider webs
The metallic buzz of cicadas
Already the heat a sodden wrap
The boy with a stick
Trying to trap the spiders
Away from the funnel of escape
A glass jar
A large hornworm
On a tomato leaf
Black frass
Spotting the green
No escape
The sun condensed
In a glass bubble
Peter Ciccariello
***
An ardour in the wind, flowers
thickening into spring. Thaws
afflict the mind, rivers of disaster.
They step, thin, lyrical,
out of the birches, they stand shining,
their footprints dark behind them
breaking the frozen grasses.
As if a myth had spoken
everything went silent, the sun blazed
silver, an intensity of motion,
the thrill of a knife cutting
then and now or the sudden
fall of a hawk, a shadow lapped
and vanishing in water, an eyelid
snapping open, dazzled full.
Alison Croggon, Williamstown, Australia
***
I am recovering from too much
drinking or dreaming
you're phoning from up-country
with woes of the drowned camera
corrosion and insurance and bruises
but yet you can visit the frozen cobwebs
around the verandah
morning radio trickles in its woes and strangers
a little piece of sky burnt bright
as it fell over Sydney this morning
listen to the astronomers explain
and then there's the world
all the contusions we know and don't know
my knee or my dream is stiff where it clipped the floor
you tell me that down by the creek
there were twelve baby platypus, with bright eyes
they are curious you say
and no bigger than your hand
Jill Jones
18 August 8.10am Marrickville
***
"Doggie Friendly"
Well Behaved Dogs Always
Welcome, A Long with You
At the 11:00 A.M.
Sunday Worship Service
Golden Gate Church
Dolores & 19th
San Francisco
Stephen Vincent
***
I am waiting for the sky
to fall. I am waiting
to be wrapped in its blue
cloak. I wait for this pain
in my shoulders to grow
into wings. I wait for
the one who can lift me
without effort. I wait for
the people in this book
to step out and fold me
in. I am waiting for winter,
for this dream to open
into spring, I am waiting
to wake up.
I sit in this room with
the other petitioners,
with the flat wood tables,
with the magazines
and their glossy pages.
I am waiting for my name
to be called. I am waiting
to be told what to do. I am
rising to my feet. If you call
my name, shall I follow you?
These altered windows
shed the sun like water.
There is nothing out there,
on the other side.
Sharon Brogan
***
TURN THE CORNER
Fifty-second birthday
divorce is in the air
curses and flying china
we are living in
Plan 9 From Outer Space
and one hour later
I am in the dentist's chair
novo and nitrous
no help
I can't save them says
Dr. Voglino
too far gone
they all have to come out
you need dentures
and all I can do at that moment
is weep "like a baby"
who has no teeth either
groan My marriage is dying
I'm fifty fucking two years old
you're telling me I have to gum my food
and go broke doing it
I am truly damned
to hell with it
do it do it all.
At the end of the day
they don't look so bad.
Nothing matters but
nothing needs to
as long as you bite.
Kenneth Wolman
***
Annotations
Legible greens -
the difference between
yellow and cyan
The colors seen
in circular, magenta
compositions
The crash of photons
in a glycerin flash
All the trailing sentences
that dot and dash...
I notice the polymer
flecks on your skin
- how clouds fall
in cerulean blue
and the lines
that appear
to begin inside
the outside edge
The translations
and annotations
of your Proust-like lips,
and Whitman ways
the things
I remember
months and years,
too late
Deborah Russell
***
A woman is crying profusely, an expression of despair, clinging to a heavy
gate.
A photographer, taking the crying woman's picture, is looking unhappy, an
expression of sadness.
The Prime Minister, watching a video of the scene, is teary in front of an
ambiguous expression.
It is all so unfortunate.
Lawrence Upton
***
THE BOYHOOD OF THE ADMIRABLE
Nae joiner, wee Jimmy Crichton,
neither Tongs nor Cumbie,
an good at his books. Nae that
he wisnae handy with his weapons.
Naebody messed with him. See,
he was just a touch mental. Polite,
but still you could see it there.
An they poems he made -- gallus!
Off the top o his heid, an
he never wrote them doon. Shame
that, now he's gone.
Where did yi say he was the now?
Brigton? Aye, tae be expected.
Didnae quite fit here, somehow.
Mind you, the daft bugger never
fitted onywhere. Odd that, but.
Wonder whit'll become o him.
Sir James Crichton, sometimes known as the Admirable Crichton.
Born Perth 1560, killed in a fight in Mantua, 1582.
Robin Hamilton 10.23am
***
UNREAD BOOKS
looking at
the books
unread books
lots of books
on his shelves
and then
looking at
his age
lots of age
the idea
came to him
that he had
only time
perhaps
to read
the first and last
pages of each
or even paragraphs
if short
or if pushed
just the titles
or maybe.....
pmcmanus
Raynesparkuk
***
Superlatives
in the ads for Lear
softened us up for quite a night:
King Lear at the Melbourne
Theatre Company:
ŒThe most perfect specimen
of the dramatic art existing in the world¹
- Percy Byss.he Shelley.
ŒNo play like this anywhereŠ
is so terrifically human¹
- Alfred Lord Tennyson.
ŒShakespeare¹s greatest play¹
- The Daily Telegraph.
(Now why should The Telegraph
carry such authority?)
Well, we went, and the folk on stage,
they did their level best - a low level.
The veteran in the role of Lear
early hit his shrill top anger note,
the others hissed, fast-talkers
with lines uncomfortable to them.
The men all wore grey business suits,
the women power-dressed, except
of course Cordelia,
gently understated.
Lear¹s Fool was the same girl,
a slip of a thing in a soiled slip;
a voice-mike made her echo wanly.
At the interval we hunkered down.
Rain set in the length of the wide front row.
We in the third row didn¹t get splashed.
Through the steady downpour
agony was evident OK,
sheltering near a wrecked car body
in a side-turned garbage skip.
The gouging elicited audience shrieks.
The fights were with silver pistols,
bang bang bang. Gloucester rolled
from the roof of that car wreck
to a soiled mattress. I closed my eyes till
the old words stirred me again:
never never never never never.
17 August 2005
Max Richards
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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