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, Ivanhoe
>
> 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
########################################################################
To unsubscribe from the POETRYETC list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=POETRYETC&A=1
This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/POETRYETC, a mailing list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are available at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/
|