…ng its way towards us like the bleeding protagonist stabbed who refuses to die/darkness is a promise/like cousin cool/do you promise? I have sweatered so much this day I can jumper no further. As coolth lays its stealth in a beam lowly under the trees/we stagger out/of the shopping mall carrying strawberries and tomatoes in my hat/swung by its string, a bonnet punnet/and all the trees/little and large and oblivious to cars one hopes/lay their shad…
…clung baking tins stacked in the sink half-filled with water. Either I will turn into a human sofa and have to turn sideways to enter a doorway, be unable to leave the house and eventually fill it with my lardlike balloons of flesh, or I will die young of a preventable illness, or I’m soon going to have eaten so much cake mix I will never bake again. Damn you, red clothbound bachelor cookbook with your enticingly pineapple-ring-lined black and whi…
…number of actors being shot dead at point-blank range with no warning, I found it beautiful and strange. The credits rolled and I leaned forward eagerly, trying to see who had made all that intricate and baffling music. The guy in front had pulled out his phone and was already deeply immersed in his messages. That the world could collapse while you’re in the cinema, in the dark, unable to do a thing to prevent it or hinder it. That by staying on t…
…ng in the wind. We took refuge with our new Queensland number plates in an underground coffee shop with sweet, chirping songs playing softly and the hum of a rather old fridge. “How’s your day been?” asked the barista and I said, cheerfully, “Windy!” He said, “Oh, I know. It’s worst up at the cross-street there, a kind of a wind canyon, and I have to go against it to get here, turn up with tears in my eyes.” “That’s so harsh!” I said, exulting. Yo…
…last page to the end I suddenly realise with a hot shock: she is about to die, the main character actually dies on the final page. I paid insufficient attention to the last two or three lines. Beforehand as he is watching her go there are people grappling for their status and their airbearable possessions. And “The passengers passed through the disembodied doorway, one by one. There was a woman in pink linen: ‘Does this machine spoil pearls?’” Th…
…over me, I am so cold, I’m so wet.” But we had climbed up the stairs and found the skinhead gig right up under the roof, the boys clustered at one end the girls coiled at the other, we looked out the clotted windows on the Valley, Friday night concupiscence, all the sleek taxi cabs stopping and starting at the curb, the people stumbling in and out of places, the girl who looked like Ashley Judd and the post-traumatic-stress-disordered Scottish Fal…
…time later I pick up the book again, wishing it was heavier and fatter. I will read to the end today, then read it again, I’m so glad and relieved that greatness exists still among us, that it won’t all die when Shirley Hazzard dies, that it didn’t all fold down into the grave with Elizabeth Gaskell and her “kindly spirit that thinks no ill [and] looks out of her pages irradiate.”…
…ders. I thought: The meaning of life is love, what else can it be. I don’t understand why people keep asking. And as I flung the gorgeously aged garden tools someone had left in a pile of trash beside the road into the back of my ute, disturbing the spider who lives there on her quivering and much-travelled web, and slung myself behind the steering wheel and roared off I was crying out in my heart: I say this every day of my life, I will keep sayi…
…he image jetlag plants in me of half the world sleeping in their bed-tombs under the water, as the sun splashes its giant curves up and down the round walls of Earth and drags them on, made me think again about how air travel feels like being away at sea. I guess it doesn’t last as long. But the feeling of being returned safely to dry ground is just as dull and amazing, just as blessed. The dangers are the same: you could fall overboard and be eat…
…ndles. To get there I had to pass twenty-five Christmas trees, laid out to die on the stones. A wax-stick notice scribbled in the window of a nearby cafe said, Be at least epic. I found a bar I liked and it took me two passes to work up the courage to go in. The barman was Spanish and wearing a beautiful waistcoat. He brought me a clean glass of water, a fresh white napkin, a glass bowl of pretzels, and an ashtray. He folded his hands and said, Wa…
…ed an apostrophe two years ago to someone’s vehement caps-lock scrawl WONT DIE IN SILENCE. On a windowsill stood a half-eaten hamburger, which at first glance seemed to have molded over. I started think of the experiments people do with processed food where you stand a burger under a glass shade and months later it has not rotted. I remembered the droll jazz lover I befriended in an Ethiopian jazz cafe in Melbourne who rather lucidly summarized th…
…ine and hugely enjoying his hot dog – or some kind of meat that will never die forced into a large white bread roll. In his opposite hand he held a catering-size bottle of red chilli sauce and was squeezing a gout of chilli into the open end of the roll each time he took a fresh mouthful. Though perhaps ‘fresh’ in this context is not quite the right word. The sun is shining. Four men spilled out of an art gallery wearing hats and overcoats and one…
…opelessly flat. On the pavement a woman passed wheeling a bicycle, sailing under steam, under her own steam. Her long brown hair tangling behind her. A small, queenly child perched on the bicycle seat. The child had clots of molasses-coloured dreads in a long ponytail; she rode her mother’s bicycle as though it were a steed, her beauty an admonition on us all. The sister came pedalling behind, dreaming atop her own bike as her little feet propelle…
…ne? I know what we are in for. No more birdsong. The leaves fall to the ground. The grounds turns to iron. The limited colours, low white skies. The outdoor cinemas are closing. I saw candles in the windows of a backstreet cafe today. I wore a scarf in the afternoon sun. These little deathknells make me sentimental and bleary, like a Dickens character. Little Deathknell, and the Year That Took Three Months to Die. I’m standing with one leg on the…
…d another bush with the same flowers and went over to it, making kissing sounds – my companion said, mildly, “Are we going to be doing this all the way home?” Alongside the boules courts we passed a man unzipped with his back turned, right there among the people, women, children, men, dogs, he had barely bothered to shunt himself into the bushes and it seemed so arrogant, so rude. I stared at him, turning my head as we walked past until he looked…
…revived. Now he has revived, to a certain extent, all by himself. Or, via company. The companionship of the three of us in the house with this wonderful carer who is never too tired to bring him a fresh glass of milk when he calls into the baby monitor at three a.m. has latched him back onto life. The night after the voluntary cup of tea he had a friend visit who had come all the way from Sydney just to see them. It was the first time in all Dad’…
…, from Finland, said tolerantly, “That bread is not very dark at all.” Not compared to a place where it only gets light every 25 years for a half hour one sunstroked afternoon… no. In between I had been lying on my couch wondering could one literally die of heartache and it felt so good to take something I had made of beauty out of all this intolerable and endless sore grieving and throw it up in the air like a pigeon caught in the fireworks. I th…
…e person again.” I said, “Yes. But I suspect that is more so that they can comfort themselves.” “Oh, yes,” he said. “But if there was another life, maybe Nana would become Papa and then Papa could be Nana. And then Nana would be famous! And Papa would be…” He hesitated, realising he was just about to insult my mother. “Papa would be… not quite exactly so famous,” he said. I said, “You know… I’m not really convinced that Papa was actually all that…
…er been. It is hard to be the survivor of a 50-year marriage. People often die on the heels of their spouses. A few years back I rang my Dad on his birthday. I sang happy birthday to him over the phone. I was in Adelaide and they were all in Brisbane. He told me they had taken him out for a steak dinner. He described the wine, he loved sparkling shiraz. We chatted for perhaps twenty minutes. Then Dad said, “By the way.” Casually. “Your brother’s i…
…identical diagnosis. He too may die in agony. “Karma!” people crow. They sound uncannily undissimilar to Johnson and his cronies, or Trump and his ilk, gnashing their hands in satisfaction when a raped women gets what’s coming to her, or a sexually active teenager falls pregnant, or an entire population of Jewish Germans are rounded up and eliminated because they are less human than Us. This tyrannical Us. How it bonds us to our best humanity. How…