It rips me each time I tear away from you, I leave something of this newly created world behind again. I don't want to feel this pain, I'll do it only this one last time. Then again, and just one more time. And maybe once more. My skin is raw.

Today the very first ripened Ballardia of the season, a pink taste in my mouth. Some time later astringency at the back.

...I leave something of this newly created thing on your shirt. I long for you until the sun goes down or until I find something to preoccupy me, and I am no longer inside you. Free of you like fish are free of the shore.

I forget that I am going to feel this pain because I lived so deeply inside your tunnels. The bright night swims down to me, I burst like a fish into the rocks beachside.

I burst like a fish into the rocky shore, tearing across a plateau, on my way back to the ocean. Forget I ever said this? It is there, it is here, it is in a bowl at the back of the fridge.

Jesus rises fresh and dripping still magically opposed to death, as if it makes things any easier.

Jesus sinks and I am left alone on the surface, looking all around me in confusion.

I'm ripped open each time I leave you.

The stiches rip the skin around the wound.

Stitches rip out of the skin of my wound each time I leave you. I cannot keep doing this, this is the final time I'm going. Then once more, then once more and then one last time. By then I'll be healed.

the world you showed me is really perfectly a reflection. I'm suprised that I didn't notice it earlier, I think becauseit fits so neatly into this one, just there between the cracks and under the line

Becalmed

Paintings circa 1995.

Ravensthorpe

Ravensthorpe road



A paddock of rape stems.



A not-so-beautiful replanting in ravensthorpe.

Mt Barren Ranges from the highway.

Palimpsest

I
Driving back from Denmark on Wednesday morning I recognised for the first time the relevence of the word "palimpsest" in the landscape architecture discourse: along the road corridors, suddenly in the middle of a mound of rocks in a paddock, in the riparian zone suviving under bridges are thin, very thin strips of native vegetation. Perhaps a single line of marri trees, an occassional stand of coastal jarra, a patch of complex riparian community surviving at a river mouth...These are the tiny lines remaining when you rub out a page of writing. Carelessly you've failed to remove a whole line of letters at the side of the page or a few strokes stay where you pressed harder to make a point and the pencil cut a little deeper into the paper; maybe the indentation of the marks remains without the lead.
So it is that a little bit of bush remains in the landscape rewritten as agriculture. Tiny remnants of Australian vegetation - or should it be pre-Australian vegetation? - these thin marks allow you to imagine a forest, a complex of interactions and timeframes and you could dream the dots and lines reconnected as a whole system. Each fragile moment hints at a vast swamp of time that it might be possible to recreate. But the new story written on the palimsest is fences, sheep and tail-docked dairy cows, an old man tinkering under a Fordson tractor, a patch of bright green sub-clover in kikuyu grass, thin and brown come summer. Try rubbing that out with jarrah and marri and Acacia accuminata.

II

...Anyhow, I was talking about writing to create the new story of talking to someone about something, making a story of a happening or an event then constructing a theory of the event, constructing a palisade on a palimpsest. Re-writing a notional contrivance to dredge up a forum of time that could conclude the swampish indulgence of and fulgence in the swamp of morass of tears. Does it come from having nothing to do; or does it come from not having anything to do?

"He told me, I must sit here and do nothing. That is what I am doing."

"I ask you again, have you nothing to say of any use?"

"Nothing doing!"

"There is nothing here."

"I don't think it'll be able to support anything now."

"I sat all day, in the sun, by a window, warm, because I did not have a thing to do."

"I did not have anything better to do."

"I have nowhere I would rather be."

"I am here because I don't have anywhere I would rather be."

"I am sorry for you."

"I wish you weren't."

[But I didn't say "I have nowhere to go," I said I have nowhere better to go.]

Buckets of Rain, Buckets of Tears

I know it's depressing and unproductive to talk about it, but i just need to say how depressed I am and how completely sick of it I am. I thought I could manage it, find a way through it without anti depressants and for about 6 weeks I did feel heaps better, but now I just seem to be back to the old pitch, crying all the time, not able to find a programme to occupy myself with during the day. Etc etc etc. it's so very boring.
Maybe there is a solution. Maybe I just need to wade through the floods of tears and eventually I'll come out the other side. But right about I am just nearly prepared to give up and get back on the drugs.
Hope everyone else is having a better day than me!

Eucalyptus platypus platypus

Have been measuring trees for 4 weeks, and just got back from Ravensthorpe. One of the favourite sites we measured was a large stand of mort, on a farm just below the Lake Magenta Mallee Fowl Reserve.