For some reason

it's not a song that trundles forth from my morning jukebox but a poem, Ozymandias, by P. B. Shelley. ¿Qué Pasa. Perhaps it's the tectonic drift of memory, pushing aside the more recently acquired & exposing things learnt long ago. What next? The Andrews Sisters? The Mills Brothers? Patti Page singing Old Cape Cod? Fess Parker singing The Ballad of Davy Crockett? (Which just happened to be the first record I ever bought. The second was The Modern Jazz Quartet doing Django. Tectonic upheaval. Watershed moment.)

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

the same song / in different seasons

I'd decided

not to write anything more about the floods, but I've just discovered these terrific before & during aerial photographs of Brisbane & Ipswich that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation have posted to their website.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/infographics/qld-floods/beforeafter.htm

Run yr cursor over the pix to get the contrast. There are two pages.

Gong Xi Fa Cai

De tritest thing

The facts, Ma'am. Just the facts.

I'm not a well-organized person when it comes to the residue of my writing.

I've been almost totally electronic for the last five years.

Therefore, the jumbled piles of paper & envelopes & & & that are scattered around my workroom, on top of & under & in, are probably at least five years old, with the possible exception of little hand-written notes on the back of shopping dockets & such.

I've started trying to sort everything out. (Note to Geof Huth: why is there never an archivist around when you need one?) Now I have many smaller piles of unsorted stuff all over the floor, a lot of envelopes & packing slips have gone into the recycling bin, & I've an idea of how I'm going to categorize what I've got left. When I get around to it. Which I'm going to have to do soon. I'm finding it tricky to pick my way across the room.

To amuse myself in the venture, to give myself something to look forward to, I've decided to transcribe—electronically, of course—the shopping docket scraps, & post them as Detritus Poems. Slight, light, but, hey, you never know.....

The first one's below.

Detritus Poem #1: The Elephant in the Room

Screams for some
time. Then an
elephant came
out from the room

& left the house.
Later, hammering.
A bed being re-
built, the furniture

restored. Bestiality
is not always what
it's cracked up to be.

my annual Australia Day post

On 26 January, 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip, on behalf of the Crown of Great Britain, took formal possession of the colony of New South Wales and became its first Governor.

However, for Aboriginal Australians and many others, the 26th of January is not a day for celebration. To them the date signifies invasion and dispossession. As Thomas Keneally noted in his 1997 Australia Day address -

"A majority of Australians can see why today cannot be a day of rejoicing for all, and that therefore there may be grounds for ultimately finding an Australia Day, a celebration of our community, with which we can all identify."

The choice of 26 January as the day of celebration for all Australians has been queried and argued from a historical and practical viewpoint from the 1800s. That the day might symbolise invasion, dispossession and death to many Aboriginal people was a concept alien to the average Australian until even the latter half of the 20th century. The Editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald of 2 January 1995, arguing for a change of date, stated that January 26 "can never be a truly national day for it symbolises to many Aborigines the date they were conquered and their lands occupied. This divisive aspect to 26 January, the commemoration of the landing at Sydney Cove, will never be reconciled".

Involvement of the Indigenous community on Australia Day has taken many forms - forced participation in re-enactments, mourning for Invasion Day, peaceful protest through to an acknowledgment of survival and an increasing participation in community events at a local level.

By 1888, the year of the centenary celebrations, the white population had increased significantly while the Aboriginal population had declined from at least 750,000 in 1788 to a mere estimated 67,000. (Aboriginal people were not counted in the census until after 1967). The 1888 Centenary events overwhelmingly celebrated British and Australian achievement and as Nigel Parbury writes in his book Survival: ”In 1888 Aboriginals boycotted the Centenary celebrations. Nobody noticed.”

By 1938, the Aboriginal community was becoming well organised in the white ways and able to make strong demands for political rights and equality. An Australian Aborigines League (AAL) had been formed in 1932 and this was followed in 1937 by the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA), a group that began to achieve publicity in the press and addressed a variety of groups such as the NSW Labor Council.

The AAL leader William Cooper and the APA's leader William Ferguson, were instrumental in organising the Day of Mourning Committee for the 1938 Sesquicentenary celebrations. A manifesto, Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights, was published and on Australia Day a conference and protest were held in the Australian Hall, Sydney. Five days later, the APA led an Aboriginal delegation to meet with the Prime Minister and soon after Australia Day, the Committee for Aboriginal Citizen Rights was formed.

The Aboriginal community's push for recognition was highlighted by the 1938 official Australia Day celebrations. Due to a refusal to cooperate by city-based Aborigines, the government imported Aborigines from western communities, locking them up in a stable at Redfern Police Barracks. Immediately following the re-enactment, the group featured on a float in the huge parade in Macquarie Street. The following day they were “sent back to their tin sheds on the Darling River”.

Re-enactments of Phillip's landing continued to be an accepted part of Australia Day ceremonies around the country and it wasn't until the Bicentennial in 1988 that the New South Wales government refused to condone a re-enactment as part of their official proceedings.

On January 26 that year, 40,000 Aboriginal people (including some from as far away as Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory) and their supporters marched from Redfern Park to a public rally at Hyde Park and then on to Sydney Harbour to mark the 200th anniversary of invasion.

From this march grew the concept of "Invasion Day" and "Survival Day", marking the anniversary of the beginning of land loss, but also recognising the survival of a race of people who had been expected to die out. In 1992 the first Survival Day concert was held at La Perouse and in 1998 the event moved to Waverley Oval near Bondi Beach.



The Aboriginal Flag was designed by Harold Thomas, an artist and a Luritja man from Central Australia, in 1971. The flag was designed to be an eye-catching rallying symbol for the Aboriginal people and a symbol of their race and identity. The black represents the Aboriginal people, the red the earth and their spiritual relationship to the land, and the yellow the sun, the giver of life.

In the late 1960s, Aborigines stepped up their campaign for indigenous land rights through protest marches, demonstrations, banners and posters. The protests increased in the early 1970s and Harold Thomas noticed they were often outnumbered by non-Aborigines with their own banners and placards. He decided they needed to be more visible and the idea of the flag was born.

The Aboriginal flag was first raised in Victoria Square in Adelaide on National Aboriginal Day in 1971, but was adopted nationally by Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in 1972 after it was flown above the Aboriginal "Tent Embassy" outside of the old Parliament House in Canberra.

It is perhaps the only symbol commonly accepted by the diversity of Aboriginal people.

The Aboriginal flag is increasingly being flown by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. In view of its increasing importance in Australian society, the Government initiated steps in 1994 to give the flag legal recognition. After a period of public consultation, the Government made its own decision in July 1995 that the flag should be proclaimed a "Flag of Australia" under section 5 of the Flags Act 1953. The flag was so proclaimed by the Governor General of Australia, William Hayden, on 14 July 1995.

(compiled from various sources, all of which, except for the one below, have succumbed to the endemic web disease of link rot)
http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/barani/themes/theme6.htm

recycled from pelican dreaming, 1/26/06.

K. Rexroth's "The Advantages of Learning"

There are certain physical characteristics you saw in your parents as they aged that you knew you would inherit. The hair colour you shared with your mother, how it would fade. The pattern of the thinning of your father's hair, & the extent of it – good to know that when he died in his nineties he still had plenty of it. The skin's blemishes, the way lines formed on their faces. Your father's shoulder slump that you also share.

But it is a poem I feel I have most grown into, unshaped by genetic inheritance. One I came across more than fifty years ago, that moved me then, that spoke to the inner me in a way I had never experienced. I do not know if it was some sort of premonition or whether it became some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy but it is the poem that I have most inhabited, that has most inhabited me, over all the intervening years. & even though I have read much that I have liked / loved since then, even though I have written much in which I expose or privately see parts of me I would have preferred remained hidden, it still remains for me the poem.

The Advantages of Learning

I am a man with no ambitions
And few friends, wholly incapable
Of making a living, growing no
Younger, fugitive from some just doom.
Lonely, ill-clothed, what does it matter?
At midnight I make myself a jug
Of hot white wine and cardamon seeds.
In a torn grey robe and old beret,
I sit in the cold writing poems,
Drawing nudes on the crooked margins,
Copulating with sixteen year old
Nymphomaniacs of my imagination.

Kenneth Rexroth

After nearly

four weeks, the water over the airport has gone, & the runway has been repaired sufficiently to allow daytime flights in & out.

It's a positive sign. But there are still a number of negatives.

There is still rubbish piled up outside many of the houses that were affected by the floods. In contrast to the co-operative people power that has been happening in Brisbane, it's almost as if the council here has decided to take their time to clean up the worst affected areas, nearly all of which are in the poorer parts of town.

There are still roads closed, enormous potholes on many that are open, snakes, lakes that were once lagoons, lagoons that were once ponds, ponds that were depressions in the landscape. The smell of mud & decayed vegetation still drifts in, especially at night. Birds avoid some of the watery areas they once frequented. Dead fish wash up in one of the lagoons. There are mudline markers on houses that haven't yet been washed away.

& even though fresh food & produce are coming in regularly now, the supermarket still isn't stocking my favorite 2-liter container of iced milk coffee. Until that is fixed, let me just say that, for me, the floods still ain't over.

adonis

Snakes on a (flood) plain

I'm tempted to class it as paranoia, but L. reassures me I'm only exercising an understandable vigilance. Whatever it is, let just me say that I've seen more snakes in the last few weeks than in my entire previous life, & I'm much more than a little bit twitchy.

Enough is enough, already. I've seen snakes in the water, crossing the back driveway, on the front porch, in the letterbox, in the laundry. INSIDE in the laundry, INSIDE the house! What happened to that house is a castle thing? & yesterday, I was about to push open the back screen door to go out & have a cigarette when what do I see but a brown snake poking its head around the corner followed by the rest of its meter-long body. I don't know whether it saw me, or whether it decided that there wasn't much to explore, but it turned, slithered across the pavers, & disappeared with a speed & an ability to camouflage itself that was, in retrospect, frightening. One moment it was there, the next it was nowhere to be seen.

Let me add that my apprehensions were not improved by the item on the news last night that claimed the Eastern brown snake was the second-most poisonous snake in the world.

So, today, when I hung the washing out, I spent so much time checking the surroundings that I had to push my eyeballs back into place when I came inside. & when I went outside again some time later, & one of the little lizards that live in the holes in the brickwork, & which I normally quite happily co-exist with, scuttled away from me, I shat myself. Well, maybe not that extreme a reaction, but, I have to admit, I shied away from it faster than I thought I could move these days.

I wander

along the
stochastic
process that
is YouTube.

Eventually
a steady
state is
reached.

Beauty is
not in the
eye. Context
is everything.

A revision

Just over six years ago, after a trip to Sydney, I posted about what we'd done there, what books I'd bought.

I wrote at the time:

Bought some new stuff.......The Portable Magritte — 400 plates yet! At the rate I write my Series Magritte poems that's about seven years feedstock.

I need to revise that statement.

At the rate I'm writing my Series Magritte poems these days, there's about 70 years feedstock in the book.

Today the
postman brought
me nothing. An
empty mailbox
later filled by a
green & yellow
tree snake
which watched
silently as I de-
toured around it
taking the garbage
out. That arc re-
traced returning
until eye contact
broken. Which
is when the
snake spoke. Said:
"What does not change / is the will to change"

Newsflash: Blow-up sex toys are "not recognized flotation devices."

In Queensland, acts of stupidity during the floods were mainly confined to attempts to drive across flooded causeways, usually resulting in death, or jumping from bridges into swollen rivers, usually resulting in difficult rescues.

In Victoria, however, it seems like the floods offer other avenues.....

A bizarre decision to ride an inflatable doll down a flood-swollen Yarra River blew up in a woman’s face yesterday when she lost her latex playmate in a rough patch.

The incident prompted a warning from police that blow-up sex toys are "not recognised flotation devices".

Police and a State Emergency Services crew were called to the rescue when the woman and a man, both 19, struck trouble at Warrandyte North about 4.30pm yesterday.

They were floating down the river on two inflatable dolls and had just passed the Pound Bend Tunnel when the woman lost her toy in turbulent water.

The rescued pair were checked by ambulance officers but did not require medical attention.

"The fate of the inflatable dolls is unknown," said Senior Constable Wilson.

Sydney Morning Herald

which, of course,

reminds me of a personal favorite from amongst my Postman (who, sadly, doesn't seem to be calling that often these days) Poems.....

Today the
postman brought
me a blow-up
sex doll &
a torch. I spent
the night in
shining amour.

Somehow,

& I don't exactly know how, one of the many snakes that have been displaced by the floods got into the house.

I discovered it by accident—got up from the computer in my study, walked out into the inside laundry to get a drink from the refrigerator, & stepped on it. Scared the shit out of both of us. The snake took off & slithered under the hotwater cylinder, I don't know exactly where I went, but the ceiling seems like the most probable place.

We tried to find it, but could find no trace. Got the name of a snakecatcher from the local council just in case. But its absence for the rest of the day halfway indicated that it may have headed outside again, through some opening which we couldn't see.

Wrong. Was working this evening—actually hadn't got that far; was checking my emails when I noticed a head swaying back & forth out from under the waterheater. We managed to coax/drive it out briefly from its hideout—time enough to take the pic below, sufficient room for it to be fully visible, but the space too confined to be able to take major action against it, especially with that hotwater pipe beneath it.


We moved things to give us clear visibility of the surrounding area, I developed battle strategies to try to keep it confined overnight, but decided to stay up for a while longer than normal so see if it would come out again.

Which it did. Out into the open. Where I met it with the back of a shovel.

I shall be visited by the Serpent King tonight. My dreams will be poisoned.

geographies: Tenerife

                               Magma has an organic 
                                       shape & cools rapidly 
                          when it comes in 
                                              contact with water. The 
                              conceptual pavilion was
                                         designed with minimal-
                                    ism in mind. The first 
                       video chosen—even 
                                                    if it's simply an 
                                 array of periodic boxes 
                                      that separate perfume 
                    from air—will 
                                  always play perfectly.

National Radar Map, 4.38 p.m. AEST

We're in that small clear area on the eastern seaboard. The sun's shining here, & it's about 32° C. But further down the coast, the rain that's bringing death & devastation to Brisbane & the surrounding towns & cities can be clearly seen, as can its already-begun path into New South Wales, Victoria & South Australia.

There's a cyclone forming off the Western Australian coast in the same area that was flooded a couple of weeks ago. Further south there are bushfires.

The map's from the BOMsite.

arrt