Thanks, Doug. Yes, I can see it is still whittleworthy.
Bill
On Thu, 4 Jun 2020 at 2:35 am, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Ah, Bill,
>
> these memories, so rooted in a specific. You may find you want to snip a
> bit here & there for more rhythmic intensity, but it’s neatly done, slowly
> letting then tree emerge as protagonist of it all.
>
> (& there is [or was] Paperbark Press, with some damn fine books).
>
> Doug
>
> > On Jun 2, 2020, at 4:10 PM, Bill Wootton <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> >
> > Out the front of 69 Livingstone Street, I
> <https://www.google.com/maps/search/nt+of+69+Livingstone+Street,+I?entry=gmail&source=g>
> vanhoe
> >
> > a Melaleuca linariifolia stood in the nature strip,
> >
> > one of a string of half a dozen or so: paperbarks.
> >
> >
> > Untidy, half-peeling white flaps of bark hugged the trunk,
> >
> > each thinner than a cigarette paper. Like a big broccoli,
> >
> > dense, creamy white flowers clumped in its canopy.
> >
> >
> > But the flowers were way up high. From the window
> >
> > in the front room of my rented house, only the trunk
> >
> > could be seen as I groped for undergraduate sentences.
> >
> >
> > Words required pulling from my fettered mind.
> >
> > Often they stayed as stuck as the dirty white bark
> >
> > on that tree, as wind whistled down Livingstone St.
> >
> >
> > None of us had a motor mower but a push-job
> >
> > was good enough for most of the nature strip
> >
> > even if it was a hairy proposition on the road side,
> >
> >
> > involving street stepping around the scruffy girth.
> >
> > By the end of Honours year, no mower would fit
> >
> > and the grass had to be clipped or stay shaggy
> >
> >
> > The Cal Bung house has long bitten the dust now.
> >
> > Units, at least six, splay out on the old block.
> >
> > But the paperbark has only firmed its claim.
> >
> >
> > The circumference of the trunk is now such
> >
> > that not only can no grass be seen on the road side
> >
> > or the footpath side but the concrete kerbing
> >
> >
> > has cracked. I’ve fallen short of the doctorate
> >
> > hurdle but forty years down the track, the nature
> >
> > strip paperbark has its eyes on a bitumen prize.
> >
> >
> > bw
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
> https://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
> Recent publications: (With Sheila E Murphy) Continuations & Continuations
> 2 (UofAPress).
> Recording Dates (Rubicon Press).
> Listen. If (UofAPress):
>
>
>
> When thugs were in power, educated people were the first
> to feel their fists. It was so pathetic, really, how so much violence
> came from someone feeling small. Small of mind, and it did not
> matter how big the sword in hand, that essential smallness remained,
> gnawing with very sharp teeth.
>
> the scholar Janath Anar
> in Steven Eerikson’s Reaper’s Gale
>
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