Disintegration to find it, I.

An inability to write is an inability to write is not having anything to say no not having nothing to say but without the words to write down what is on my mind, to hear what is on my mind, to see it and translate it into words not having the language that can make it sound like it sounds in the sounding shell of my mind. My cunt is on my mind.

But without words to write what I think it is to hear what is on my mind, to see and translate the words which have no language which can make it sound like it sounds in the shell of my skull. My vagina is on my mind but did not write it down, what is it seems to me that what is heard as I can remember,

to see it and load it is not a language

can here but be achieved
but did not write it down, then what is my impression that what is heard as I can remember,
Can not write can not write, is not no no no no say, my vagina is my thoughts.
Inability to write is not able to write is nothing
to say anything, nothing
to say but no
words to write

what I think is what is heard on my mind, to see and those without language, which can make it speak but did not write it down, it seems what is for me that which is heard as I can remember, to see it, tell someone what to say, but not the words to write what I think is what you hear of my mind, see, and without the language, which can be done. Cunt

mind.

(I went to the vivid desert for a drive and came out dry, too dry,
I've been too dry too long, far too
long. I'm going back to the coast to get rained on.

Tall trees.

I want to get wet.

I want the sting of cold rain on my face and in my heart, grey clouds and soft light breaking through all over me. I want to stand on my skin and wash the dust out of my veins, stand on the streaming streets water courses drains rivulets running through the lines in my face, my hair, swim down the street, flow down the drains into the glassy harbour.)

I would like to be a thorn coast, was Rain. My face and in my heart, grey clouds and soft light to break the All I.

flow in the street
river runs through the line rains, my face, my Hair, swimming, in the street drains flow down to the glassy harbour
grey clouds and soft light breaking through all over me
I want to position your skin, wash the dust off my veins and streaming on the street run through the lines of your face, my Human hair, bathe the street, the flow down the drains into the harbour. and the light on all questions. I want your skin, wash the dust off my veins and on the city roads I

Human hair, bathe in the street, the flow down drains into wine.

(I have vivid desert, drive, and left the dry, very dry. I was too too long, too long. I will return to vein and urban roads sewage water rivulets running through the lines of my face, I Human, swimming in the street, drainage flows into the vitreous port.)

Long tree. I want to get a drink. I want a cold rain and a bitter
all questions. I'm your skin to place.

There's only enough room for one in here, you and me. Back here, again, drinking flowers,

but better listening, listening this time to the soft music, gentle chords lightly on the tendons in my neck, my throat, the breathe in my throat, soft pause. Each string buzz is a caress on the nerve centre spinal messenger of flesh, warm blood flow, flow, buzz, shiver and shift in my seat. Neither of us knows what the sound of your fingers sliding down the strings is called.
Only enough space here, you and me. water flowers, only better
Listen, listen to the music this time, gentle chords of the tendon gently on my neck, my throat, breathing in my throat soft suspended. Each string expression is a messenger caressing the flesh nerve spine, the warm blood flow, flow, word of mouth, trembling and change behind. Neither of us unknows
theunvoice of your finger
s down the string.
How it feels! under particular my epidermis, I know the coordinates. It is nerve stroking, running fingers under my string, lips, your teeth? How did the teeth of Jimmy Hendrix call it?
Back here again, water flowers Listen, listen to the music this time
Back here again, but better
listening, hearing this time, soft music, gently chords lightly on the tendons in my neck, my throat, and breath in my throat, the soft break. Each string buzz is petting us, central, nervous, spinal messenger flesh, warm blood flow, flow, buzz, shiver and shift in my place. Neither of us knows.
Not only enough for a room here. listen, listen
time,
skinware, music, chords gentle light
on the tendons in the neck, infringe each line is bothering happy,
scarred Not all of us knows
what is the sound scald
I only enough for me here.
How to feel! I know the coordinates. This is a touch nervous, run the string in my fingers, lips and teeth?
feel
He is stroking my cheek, running his fingers in my string, lips, play it
It feels like! It is stroking the cheek, running his fingers in the string, each, that?

Your voice on the back of my neck I'd call pulling each tendon string and playing chords that tingle a vibration that loosens the sense from my brain cells. I don't know. But in some language I'm sure they do.
Your voice in the back each string playing chor'ds that tingle a vibration that loosens mind my brain
I do not know. But in some language I’m sure.
In a language where the sun turns skin to silk, silk to honey and you lick down to raw blood cells in a landscape of hot moist deep green big leaved ancient trees, where you could open my chest and place the light of the moon inside there, to tide cast my moods in a flood of pleasure tears, wet and sticky, creamy and hot.
An old wet hot tide, merging in my blood. Rising up in that language where they bring you pleasure on a platter and smear it all over your face, one day I'll find the century of that language.
A language of the sun to the skin of silk, silk, with honey and you to primitive blood cells in the hot and humid landscape of dark green leaves of the big old trees become, where you open my chest and place it in view of the moon, through the I feeling happy to cast a flood of tears. Heat the old trend, the integration in my blood. The rise of the language, they bring you pleasure and smear it
one day I will find the language of the Century
A language of the sun to the skin of silk, silk, with honey and lick you to primitive blood cells pleasure all the disc and smear your face, one day
The purpose of a language, where you suck down the raw blood cells
you can open and place the light inside the moon, the tides cast my feelings in the pleasure of the flow of tears, wet and gooey, creamy and hot.
Old wet hot tides, the merging in my blood.
pleasure to have and smear the whole of your heart
honey raw blood cells hot wet deep
inside the moon the tides cast emotions of joy flows tears

Old hot wet flood, a combination of the blood. The mass obtained by the language, if it will be fun bowls and smear the whole of your face, one day, I see the age of this language. Arse.
( expulsion vivid desert-dry, too dry, been too dry too long, too long. go back to the coast of Rain. Tall trees. be wet. be a thorn in my face and in my heart grey clouds and soft light to break the dust from a vein, the flow from the street, swimming. Just enough space here, you and me. Neither Your voice, my neck nor I. Climb the language. )
older, where you can open
and set it
in view of the moon
through feeling like
my tears flood,
wet
sticky
hot
hair,
to music from the vertebral line, the hot blood flow, the flow of breath, chills, and change.
is called the line. How do I know! I know. Worried?
the chain of my fingers, and it?
when can you
in the light of the moon through a sense of how to cast my flood (I intended to send vivid dry desert, very dry, I too long, too long was established. I went to go coastal rain. Uzun trees. Went to be wet. (To face my heart, grey clouds and soft light are all violations. To me your skin from the dust takes. Wash the vessels, the river goes to the streets over the street rivulets, wire, face, hair, baths, glass, drain all time into the curve of the flow.) enough! There’s space for me here. Here again, sandalwood, patchouli just the music now, flesh tones, and light tones, in my throat, to listen to listen to my soft suspension. If a string expression is a message from the vertebral line to tender cheek, warm blood flow, breathing, chills, and site of the flow it is not. We all have these fingers. How do I know! the brain cells are shaking. I do not know. Language Sunday silk, leather, silk, honey and hot and humid, dark green, open when you smydalthen this month how to light in a sense through the old blood cells to colours’ tears, wetness, stickiness and my master’s songs. Heat former tendency, blood integrity. Language is climbing, you scratch your face to bring joy and one day you can find the art of English.)


What do you think of me, however, to want
not to write something for someone
my mind to hear you to impotence, a look and language
which can be done without. I explained my idea of the vagina.
Can not write, as I remember Can not write a no no no no, not to speak, write, not what it is for me to hear what he, like seeing
is accessible. I think my vagina is.
Rain in months.
Long tree.
I want to get a drink. I want a cold rain and a bitter
On my face and heart, grey clouds and light
all questions. I'm your skin to place, I want to wash the dust
and urban roads and
sewage water running I
flow into the drain.)
flowers
,
He is coming! Under the skin, I know the coordinates. This is runningfingers his fingers Stroking the cheek
raw honey skin and blood cells you and the moon light sea joy to open the dumb feelings, my tears flow, PG, creamy wet and hot. The old hot wet flood, a combining of blood. Achieved with a collective language, it will be fun and a bowl scratch parchment, one day, this.
I call back in a voice, tone and each line and the game pulled tender vibration to lose my brain's memory cells tingling. I do not know. However, some languages, we believe that for this.

I and I

I'm reading back over stories from the last decade or so, flicking through the pages of my memory, sleeping in late and dreaming in empty rooms. I've spent too many weeks alone. I've
got packets strewn all around me, going through so much, back in Albany now after an absence of five long, dark Melbourne winters; Melbourne a black and grey landscape in the near distance, a new marker on my highway. My time there a sad pain, not quite over. Sad, but necessary and in some way an absolutely perfect pain. The pain of a splinter being removed. The pain of pulling a nappy-pin out of the heel of your left foot,
(what is the word for that sound?) scrape of metal through flesh as you step into the long grass.

The twins,(1) lying side by side on the big double bed with the feather pillows indented and grey greased from years of hair pressed there, come back to me now as I listen to the echo down the years of my various voices, some screaming softly in the night, some rational and accoustically unimpressive, and I wish that I had two bodies to go with my two minds. Then we could come to some agreement about whose fault last night was. One of us could leave the room and not come back til I'm over it.
I don't know that it's fair on us that we have to do the learning for two souls in one lifetime. And sometimes such
slow learning, double thickness.

(1) Bruce Chatwin, On Black Hill.
Photo: http://www.pbase.com/image/274414

"There's only so much prose sense you can make of poetry, otherwise it wouldn't be poetry."
-Steven Carroll

Loop

i've been a bit slack posting travel news, so i'm going to remedy it all at once!

Trip to Shelley's Beach

the mighty boosh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OSQOz3W0u4

hope it works for you, as well as it does for me...!

I Stayed in Mississippi a Day Too Long

There's only one thing that I did wrong, I stayed in Mississippi a day too long.

I'm lying on the floor all evening drinking roses off the ceiling, organ grinder's in the kitchen. And the flowers on the window ledge withered.
My heart is like the ocean, a cloud passes and I'm turned deep blue.
This passion, this fire my desire I'm sure it's all burned out.

Get up off the floor. Go outside.
Listening to your hymnals makes my mouth
still
I cannot become your hand, your skin, your love. I can't hold you open; trumpet to my lips all night I linger on the verandah, translucent.
My sister talked sense to me and now I'm not longing for you, just longing to long. Just waiting on the verandah, my lips,
my legs open, waiting for the blood to flow.
The tide is going out on my love, I can't
stop it.
My heart is not so warm, my mouth is covered over by this right hand too white and dusty for night.
Oh boy, give me back
dusty tires from too many places I've left behind,
the dirt roads of my country ramblings.
I can't give you anymore, even when you call my name. Did I offer too much, much more than I could take? Was I supposed to wait?
I gave you my black velvet jacket, zipped you up and now I'm cold.

Give me back my black velvet jacket and the 30 bucks I lent you for gas, I need to get the hell out of here.

I turn my face away from the early morning,
call me mist. Headlights reflected as you leave me. I could be driving, so tight are my lips against the red rim of your glass. But I'm not even wet in bed under your covers.
Anyway I always planned to leave tomorrow,
I'm going fishing, see if i can catch more than a rock-cod of passion.

Claire Gardened

The worst thing that ever happened to Claire, as far as she told me, happened when she left that place where she should have stayed. I think it’s good for her to talk about it all. Sometimes I approach her from around the side of the kitchen, walking to her across the lawn. It’s a while since I visited her, I should go see how she is. Usually she’s standing still, not quite on the ground, as if your approach from the wrong angle, with the light falling in the wrong way, would render her invisible. But mostly I come to her from another direction, through the gate at the back and walk alongside her little grey shed and round the corner, and mostly when I see her she’s just staring. . .
She’s staring over the corrugated asbestos fence, over the neighbour’s tiled roof, over Station Street, Fairfield and Melbourne CBD, over Footscray and the western suburbs, the rest of Victoria, the Nullarbor, The Eastern Goldfields, The Wheat Belt, the Swan Valley, staring across the wide streets and sprawling Perth suburbs and jacarandas, to the western edge, Wembley Downs for Goff’s sake, along Something Street to 156, to the first floor of a two level block of about sixteen units, and into a two-bedroom flat. And she’s staring at one thing in that flat: a three-cup stainless steel espresso coffee maker, with a gold lid!
I don’t understand why she’s so stuck on that place and that coffee pot. Why doesn’t she just buy another one?
– It cost seventy dollars, she says, and it took weeks to choose. And it’s not just that…
What she longs for is to sit in one of the white-painted wooden armchairs with the floral cushions that she’d loved and treasured despite ripping off both her brother and Neddy’s mother to buy - or because, I’m not so sure. There was this big picture window where you saw into the thick mixture of dirty Cyprus pines, mixed natives and weedy things. Once a Butcher Bird brought a mouse, scared to death, and wedged its head into a V of two branches, then split it open from chin to arse and ate its guts. She wants to see that again and she wants to be drinking hot fragrant coffee when she does.
She longs to sit in that shady living room, watching and waiting or to go into the cool, dark bedroom.
The year that she longs to live in again is 1996 I think, she isn’t very clear, when it seems that she finally realized that she’d never be able to leave him, that this was it until the end of time. La-dah-dah, and she’d never ride through Paris with the warm wind in her hair, or fuck a guy who knew how to hold her when she came, never fuck a guy that knew what foreplay was or who liked her. Never fuck a guy who wasn’t pissed. So she was resigned to staying with Neddy and the thing that she decided she had no choice but to do was to Be Happy.
In February she had said to herself, If I can’t leave him I will make myself be happy.
So she did. It was part of her day, then, to walk him happily to the bus stop in the morning, and to welcome him home warmly in the evening. She happily cooked, gardened and painted: beautiful pictures in black ink with a long calligraphy brush like a Zen master. She said nice things to her useless lover, and tried in every way to be good and calm and nice. It is possible, from what I gather, to infer that he was nicer too. He shopped with her, they played games and they giggled a lot.
. . . . .
Before she moved into the flat, she’d burdened her brother with her unhappiness when she came back from Tasmania where she’d fled to get away from Neddy early in ’95. A beautiful girl with big hands and a floppy-eared goat had offered Claire a place to build her own house, but like a hard plastic toy on an elastic cord, she’d flung back to Neddy. He’d had a car accident, and she thought he couldn’t live without her. It was only a small crash. The police found him driving from the passenger seat. He blew an impressive .27, but was easily bested three days later by a guy who was only pulled over for a faulty light, but registered an impossible .35 blood/alcohol level.
– He needs me! and she went bolting home like a rabbit to its hole at the heavy noise of collision: one and a half days in a B-double from Port Augusta by thumb.
But that flying return strained and twisted her spine. She got to Perth, to her brother’s house and realised that she didn’t want to be with Neddy. So she stayed with her brother and her back dislocated. She got up one morning and couldn’t piss because of the spasms of pain. She could hardly stand. The pain came in ripples and waves. She was terrified to move and she couldn’t stand still.
Her brother drove her to the chiropractor three times a week for the next six months, until she could walk properly and was confident on public transport.
Then she thought, Well it’s time to do something, so she took the last unit left of her degree. That was a very odd experience and it’s when, she tells me, she really starts to sees evidence of the extent of her emotional disintegration. And that’s a good word because nothing fitted together any more, all her parts were falling away from the centre, ceasing to be integrated. Everything was operating separately within her, each part of her self with its own agenda. Sure she’d been depressed before, but now her disquiet began to manifest itself in frightening ways. She thought that everything in the environment including what was read and listened to and spoken all entered into her, all movement, sound and space. It became impossible to define her Self, because she was not only changing constantly, but was unbounded. The act of description and analysis itself seemed to be another form of destruction.
Images welled up inside her, sounds created huge endless plains of knowing outside and beyond. She became lost in these unfamiliar territories sometimes for days. Then she became really frightened. She reached a wall. Slowly and carefully she touched it and felt her way along it but she couldn’t find a way around it. Small pieces of her personality wanted to leave, yet other small bits were capable of actively absorbing the wall and passing through, shifting and relocating some of her and some of the particles of the wall. For a short time she had to become the wall to be replaced, reborn: from the youth would be born the mutant adult. As a mother eats food to nourish the physical birth and the infant abandons the placenta, her youth consumed ideas to nourish her spiritual adult which tore away from the flesh of the youth and gobbled it up. This birth would be the idea made flesh.
She would flare up into rages at the slightest provocation or perceived slight, and people attacked her everywhere. Her paranoia grew large and volatile. She would heat up, flame bright, and implode in rage and desperation. This conflagration was soon followed by embarrassed remorse, tears, and further isolation. Her disease was becoming obvious.
She must have thought she was going crazy. She wanted to crawl into a hole of silence and escape the crowd. Thoughts of suicide were a relief from this anxiety. She used death as a kind of trick: imagined piercing her throat with a thin sharp knife, the point pressing right into her neck makes me shiver to imagine. But her mind was somehow able to insert a question at that point: Why die when there is so much life I haven’t experienced? She imagined things could be better. And then somehow for a brief moment, in a quick bright high like a finger of sunlight breaking through on a rainy day, she’d become excited about some little thing she had witnessed or a texture under her finger tips. There enveloped her then a kind of luminosity. I still catch glimpses of bright filament floating at her edges when she speaks of those moments of bright simplicity.
And then it would all pass and she’d be alone again, like the time when Jesus sank beneath the water, his wavy hair all wet and floating and she was left bobbing in the bottomless black ocean, surprised. The edginess lasted hours, immobilizing her, shutting down her senses. She couldn’t think, hear, listen, or comprehend. She shut people out as if they weren’t happening to her. It sounds pretty bad. She wonders that she could stand it then.
As the months passed her anxiety got more intense and persistent, and even though it can’t render her so debilitated, she still feels it now. I thought she’d always been like that, but now I don’t think she was. She does. Once she told me, it was around that time she was raped.
She became obsessed with trying to understand the notion of unconditional faith in God. She was overwhelmed by the paradox of love through fear. When I press her for details she’s reluctant to recall how the argument was constructed, and how it came to pass that she observed the Hand of the Creator in the geometry of a flower. But I think it happened that walking home one day she had bent down to find solace for her pounding thoughts in the beauty of a tiny flower but was instead blinded by the complexity of its geometric progressions, which ate into her eyes and seared into her soul. She suffered the coldest, most fearful and distressing moment of her life. Sometimes she describes it as a triumph of Reason over Reality. That fear she discovered was the offspring of obsessive reason, of analysis beyond the Self, separating her from the soil she trod. There was no comfort in it. There was no love. I am most glad that it did not happen to me. It was a moment of ultimate madness – to feel that one can never again be alone. When she recognised the geometry that daisy possessed she knew that all flowers accord to a plan and extrapolated that everything in the entire universe acquiesced to ultimate reason, and therefore not only could she never be happily alone again, but chaos did not exist. For some of us it is the ultimate hell to live in a world without chaos.
Not long after that she moved into Neddy’s flat. She tried to avoid it but he was in Perth, she visited him, she needed company and sex no matter how bad, and she was afraid of being by herself, not surprisingly. Hadn’t she been alone when she was raped? But let’s not dwell on that. It happens to everyone. The time lines are confusing. Suffice it to say that she was falling apart. Her moods were erratic and volatile, extreme and unpredictable. She was frightened and paranoid, angry, sarcastic, and demented. She was either moody silence or volatile rage. She drew squares over and over and over. She had notebooks full of squares that she drew, on the bus, on the train, in cafes, travelling all over the city, trying to escape the heat in her head. It was a relief to her brother when she left. So she spun back to her twin. How often had she tried to leave Neddy, tried to escape – almost achieved it only to snap back? And yet, wasn’t it just three months earlier that he’d said he didn’t think he loved her any more? Didn’t he write a letter that said he no longer loved her, which she’d eaten? She needed him.
And as she couldn’t leave him, would never leave him, she learned to be happy with him. She learned to be happy and have no money when the dole cut her off after she’d done her back in again working at a nursery lifting trays of soil. She learned to be the house wife she’d always despised her mother for becoming. She’d hated the deal her mother had made. And yet her mother seems to have been in a much better position – she had her children, friends, and a house of her own…
Claire gardened. She dug out the compost pit at the back of the flats, she planted tomatoes and beans and lots of bitter leafy green things that came in shiny beautiful packets with all the instructions in Italian. She taught the kid in the other flats with the baby girl, the beautiful sister and brothers, and the mum who showed her toothless gums and laughed like the belly of the world, and played poker too well for Claire, to grow spinach. And her friend with the baby that never slept made the lightest, crispest damper she’d tasted, with wet fingers and plain flour.
I tell her that there were lots of good times then, that she’d managed to be happy and she’d even had fun. She answers that she knows, she knows, she knows, but more to herself than to me. Then she tells me that she used to wake up in the middle of the night in a blackness of despair. It was opaque, tasteless hopelessness. Once she dreamed a wedge-tailed eagle into the flat, so huge, it tore the place apart.
Neddy started drinking again like he used to. Poker games became more frequent with the neighbours, more chaotic, increasingly more frequently chaotic. Beer and red wine, curried sausages, meat, pasta and the stink of day after day of empties full of butts. . . He smoked more pot and their hatred swelled up like a, I don’t know, like hatred. They hated their lives, hated the city, started destroying the relationships they’d made, started destroying the people around them and their place, their study, their tenuous togetherness. Any freshness that remained was only in their youth. So they decided to leave the city, to live off the land, to become adherents of a small Australian myth. They decided to leave the bad place that was doing this to them. She wishes that she’d been strong enough to stay on alone. She should have let him go.
She took all her paintings to the skip bin. She threw her twenty seven journals into the skip bin. She tells me she stood on a crate fanning photos up into the air and watching them fall like dead leaves into the rubbish. She threw in the negatives. She felt the coldness in the centre of her heart spreading. She sold all her art books and poetry books. He took his favourites to his uncle’s house. She sold her dad’s 65mm bellows camera still in its leather case that he’d had at school which still took beautiful photos, which he’d used to take the first photos of the farm in 1957, to a camera shop for $25. She and Neddy had a garage sale,and a man at 7am, two hours before the advertised starting time, packed her grandmother’s hand painted bone china tea set and silver cutlery and lots of other things she’d loved that she can’t even remember now into a cardboard box, and, and her coffee pot. She watched him, impotent. He offered her fifteen bucks. She couldn’t believe it.
– You’re joking, she said. That’s worth at least twenty!
One man climbed into her garden as he was leaving and pulled out all her spinach plants for himself.
– If you’re leaving you won’t need these.
She stood and watched and could do nothing. Everything was pulled out of her.
She lost control of the essence of herself. She has nothing left with which to navigate. Her record collection, the soundtrack to her life, gone for thirty dollars, all one hundred and forty seven vinyl LPs, stuff she loved or was indifferent too but that reminded her of other times and greater happiness.
And now she stares and longs for her ex-coffee pot, with the cold still in her, packed around a hole of regret. In wishing she had not given it away so cheaply she wishes she hadn’t stuffed her life in it and given that away as well. So many of her creations she threw away and with them her self-possession. Maybe it’s good for her to talk about it all, remember and try to find a way out of it now that she’s here and so very far away. Mostly when I see her she’s just staring. . .
. . . . .
I stopped by briefly yesterday. I approached her from around the side of the kitchen, walking to her across the lawn. She was standing in the sunlight, sipping coffee. She was barefoot on the ground, quite solid. She saw me straight away and smiled. She told me that she’d bought a little coffee pot from the op shop for two-fifty, and it makes just one cup, for her. She infuses it with cardamom and cinnamon and she told me things aren’t so bad now.
I hope it’s a beautiful hot Melbourne summer this year.

Christine King
2nd August 2007


(This the story that won the Brimbank Short Story Competition, 2007.)

green dress with yellow rubber gloves

Life is a road and Love is a Panel-van

The Parable of the Rock

When we travel, it is lightly, seeking to see newly and at sunset everything that lies hidden at home behind bookshelves and between the pages of.

We are a dark people, we awake at the sunset and begin our stories and collectively our everyday business in the evening. Crepuscular. The grey dawn is a going down for us. We live in tents. We travel with the winds and pitch our tents on the shifting sand, Our Prayers are not written on leaves of paper but on grains of sand flowing.

Last year we traveled beyond our normal lands of (nomad) our god whistles around our ears, something like this sometimes like a djinn, sometimes a snake's shadow sometimes the stars, always changing.

We travelled last year beyond the seasonal edge that spread fattly outside its normal limits. And so it was that from under a sand dune that had no doublt moved at least two and probably three kilometers from where it had risen on our last pass, we found the foundations of what must have once been a huge solid building.

We camped around the buckled floors, cracks trickling sand. Scattered for hundreds of miles around were diamonds, balls, bricks and squares of coloured glass that might be part of a huge jigsaw or mosaic of a building. A silence of prayer surrounded the scattered stone.

And where is their god now, the god of the rock? Shattered and scattered for miles in the desert.

Resilience is the god of wind and shifting tides that the survivor knows. Rock eventually shatters. Rock eventually becomes sand, sand always flows and shifts. Like clouds. Our gods are of rain, wind and flapping canvas. Our god is the movement of the lines, resting, moving, light or dark. You cannot remember his name. Her children get fat, then thin. Sometimes we starve on the sands. We are one and we are all dispersed.

Our god is the shape of the water container, the container is the shape of the air between the paper and the nib.

Out the Back

Went out to the farm today to give Dad and Bruce a bit of a hand to put up a fence and drench some ewes, and to pull up some fences off the sold land. Most of it has been sold, bar 400 acres, to Integrated Tree Cropping company who will Blue Gum it. Accomplished the first task, not that I did much, and they managed to get highly annoyed with each other. The ewes have freshly born lambs, so we left them alone.
I got time for a quick drive out the back to see "my plot" which is 44 acres we fenced off a few years ago to try and revegetate a swamp there. They always thought it was a stupid idea, and when I left for Melbourne in '03 it wasn't long before they were so low on feed Bruce had to run some cattle through...despite having another 2300 acres of farm.
Now I think that's a seriously flawed management system which can't organize itself to do without a one 60th fraction of the total - they must've been running pretty close to the wire. Either that or that just couldn't stand the sight of all that "unused" land, and that beautiful clover just sitting there. And my brother is a selfish cunt.

So anyway, it means not much reveg was allowed to occur naturally. But I have yet to have a thorough investigation, because when the old man drove me out there, he wouldn't stop to have a close look. Don't ask me why. I don't know.

It's funny how I've manged to put off being pissed about this for so long. Now I'm writing it down, I can feel my blood starting to boil. Like, Fuck! Seriously I mean for Fuck!

It was a really beautiful paperbark swamp. I counted 30 types of birds there one day, including black swans, a breeding pair of Cape Barren Geese, a wedgetail eagle and a few other raptors, heaps of other things I don't know the names of, plus lots of frogs, tiger snakes by the hundreds (potentially!) and a wierd blue snake that frightend the bejesus out of me one day by following up the hill. Who knows what else. The wetland systems in Esperance have such extremes of fluctuations it's amazing to consider what is possible.

One year, we had a huge flood and the seasonally dry, sandy drain that runs diagonally through the farm filled up with so much water the boys lay on a surfboard and floated the whole way down: previously unheardof depths. In the stream that year appeared swarms of small fish, that none of us had ever seen before. They were substantial too: about 6 inches long.

But where did they come from? Had their eggs had been lying dormant in the sand for decades? Who knows?

Ah well, I guess I'm not the one who's ever going to find out. I find Esperance a difficult place to be. And now the farm's been sold anyway.