1

are these fields
or a flatbed art
hemmed by mountains

these scatterings a sky
or a world above this one

a golden sunrise
a kneeling figure

ravines and temples
in clouds or speckled paint

2

a monstrous bird
on its side, beak
parting the black
collapsed caryatid
oblivious passer-by

3

the side of a silo
overcome by vegetation

4

an eye
or moon
in blue night

5

snow-melt
in the pastel's
upper corner

6

oil scraped off a landscape
the hill that fell off a wall

aspects of natural vegetation may be the same as Sydney (ref. Seddon)

but the focaccia are entirely different

*

Fremantle

At 8.40 you could fire a gun &c

*

Forget the one horse

this is a one-iron

and a no ironing-board town

*

you can see why all the really savage punk bands came from here

*

It's an art deco city. Also a high Victorian one.

Still undemolished facades (it takes recession to ensure this)

*

edge of empire

the taped sounds of barking dogs

Spencer's ‘Christ'

bitten by scorpions

*

notebook stuck on formica

sunlight on Eurokitsch

the great weight of national literature

the need to subside on a couch

‘but it's off to the School of Business, ha ha,

off to the School of Business'

– Arthur Hugh Clough School of The Popular Lyric

*

I think I'm a natural egalitarian. I am slightly alarmed to be addressed as ‘sir' by cafe waiters (this practice seems to have only recently become general)

*

CHURCH OF CHRIS

*

Goodbye pork pie hat

(one passes rested

on an inappropriate head)

back at the Villa Italia

the mind goes blank

or the light reflected off metal structures on the roof of the laboratory prior to a storm. The whitish sheets over a darkening sky, a series of regular solids, an obsessive repetition of inarticulate demands. Elsewhere there are holidays, banks circulating notes, a surfeit of intention, but here there are only moments, blocks of consciousness arrayed as patterns in fabric.

When the server goes down the sense evaporates. Corridors become walls, the narrative fades. The novelist has unravelled her plan in which moths have eaten holes. We are left as vegetation in a suburb is a memory of wilderness, a crossed wire bringing back thoughts of the past. Rumour itself ordains our history. Those marks on a fence speak as the lines of a book close upon themselves.

The blue distant hills beyond which is conjecture. The unnamed walking the wall, using up their time in the office. Everything nonetheless has a perfect three hundred and sixty degree clarity, is open to scrutiny. The top of the box removed, the silkworms among the leaves. Those white fibres form an elaborate chain in which the small and large circumferences are cemented forever.