Can we still believe in Lauren Bacall?

There are rules in this world

that make me feel safe

seamed stockings

slide into stilettos

crisp white shirts curve

and hips sway in pencil skirts

full mouths glisten red

snap wisecracks

caught by sidelong glances

and men in hats

clocks tick heavy

in honey wooded waiting rooms

black telephones ring

heavy with portent

cigarettes tap ash

a steady rhythm through each day

tough women with taut eyes

love cruel mouthed men

brill cream keeps lust in place

coffee is black

martinis sit on serviettes

phone numbers are scrawled

on backs of matchbooks

and when insomnia strikes

shots of Scotch

plot a course through the night

there are answers in the morning

they may not be the ones you want

but a well fitting coat

will see you safely onto the next train

I know things are well

when Lauren Bacall is in the frame

reluctant to leave the certainty of celluloid

and return to the chaos of life in real time

my eyes linger as the screen flickers

and slowly fades to noir

This poem was recently part of the 2010 Poetry in Film Festival, as a joint initiative between Palace Cinemas and the Australian Poetry Centre.

The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau

I stumbled across a musty little hard back copy of a book called 'Emile for today: The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau' by William Boyd and found myself strangely drawn to this treatise on child rearing and education.

As Boyd suggests, 'the modern reader is unlikely to agree with everything Rousseau says', but there is some genuinely helpful common sense in there as well as some beautiful gems of existential wisdom.

This is one of my favourites:

It is not enough merely to keep children alive. They should be fitted to take care of themselves when they grow up. They should learn to bear the blows of fortune; to meet either wealth or poverty, to live if need be in the frosts of Iceland or on the sweltering rock of Malta. The important thing is not to ward off death, but to make sure they really live.

Life is not just breathing: it is action, the functioning of organs, senses, faculties, every part of us that gives the consciousness of existence. The man who gets the most out of life is not the one who has lived longest, but the one who has felt life most deeply.

Thanks Jean Jacques via William Boyd.

An inspiring outlook indeed.

Sight bites

Today we cull our travel photos into bite-sized chunks, easily digestable over a glass of wine or cup of tea.

We flirt with the idea of an old-fashioned slide night, complete with safari suit and toothpicks stabbed into tiny slabs of cabana, pineapple and cheese.

We don't make photo albums any more. We make folders with neat names that we back up onto external hard drives and syphon onto memory sticks.

At best we upload the best of the lot onto Facebook.

Will grand children discover them in a shoe box one day and wonder how to convert them into something they can see with their teeny tiny futuristic technology?

Our sight bites.

The shiny tiny mementos of our dream like memories.

rain

A wet and green afternoon in West Footscray.

For the first time in a long time I am happy to be me. Not who I might become. But just this one exactly as she is.

I don’t know where this comes from.

The brown factory wall standing tall with small blue windows

The contents of someone’s living room deposited at the train station car park

Explosion of flowers (red, purple, yellow) in a small front yard

The creamy suffocating smell of wattle settling on my skin

My nose is red. My left knee twinges as I run.

It starts to rain before I get home.

At sea

Deep and dark

my bed is a raft

the words have fallen off the edge

must keep still

so as not to disturb the waters

wait for the tide to turn

lights at night

why is so much comfort given when you are in a foreign city, walking outside at night and you look up to see the glow of lights in apartment buildings, the shape of furniture - a high backed chair, a TV on a stand, a pot plant - and shadows moving around, going about their business ... cups of tea, a move from one room to another, stillness sitting at a table.

is it voyeurism?

feels more like connection, but maybe I am romanticising things.

this is how it is today

today it is okay

hot feet on the treadmill a soundtrack of piano accordian played in the subway

I moved along the moving walkway feeling life in slow motion like I was starring in the final montage of my life: the bit where lessons have been learned and it all comes together and I accept myself with all of the errors and rejections and mistakes and feel a sense of peace

In the garden white dust came to rest on shoes and daub sitting marks on the bums of jeans

there were hundreds of people maybe thousands but it did not make me anxious. Today was a day when that many people in one place made me glad.

This is how it is today.

these shoes

walking in foreign cities

I am obsessed with people's shoes

what do they choose?

comfort over style or both?

we seem to be living in times of unparalleled cool

skinny jeans and runners abound

tan ankle boots and slouchy soft things that only skinny Italian women can make look elegant

what do people think when they look at my shoes?

or am I the only one looking down?

this is a dangerous and defeating way to travel

luckily I bump into things quite often 

which reminds me to

LOOK UP!

Flight

We fly into endless night

time stretches like a slinky

that has lost its spring

Are we beating time 

or chasing it?

My body stores

ruminations

in the bags under my eyes

lost and found

I am missing

my striped socks

and spotted umbrella

a week away from

an overseas holiday

these minor losses

take up a lot of space

Last night

in a pub

I wondered if I saw

two people

falling in love

either that or they were

looking for the same thing

tucked into

the gap between their seats

I left before they did

so will never know

what they found

if anything

heads pressed together

eyes down

seeking those things

we lose in the cracks

umbrellas and socks

and love

and other things

like that



picture perfect day

I run in side streets

five minute increments to increase my fitness

brown chickens battle cats for scraps

the sun hangs low and fat at the end of this lane

overturned shopping trolley

lolls   its belly empty

one wheel turns a slow rotation

in this backyard lives a yellow crane

suppose they have to go somewhere

at the end of each day

boy with black hair texture of ink

carries his skateboard

along the dry creek bed

a small neat woman sweeps

the patch of dirt outside her house

into a dustpan   and takes it inside

grunting man digs up his front yard

rolls of fake grass stacked along the driveway

ready to be laid

my heart hurts but my feet are steady

on Sunshine Road I am startled

by a barking sound hurled from a passing ute

it is not a dog

it is a man making a noise like a dog

maybe he thinks he is being funny

the shout stabs a hole through my fitness goal

reduced to a walk I seek out alleyways  

running seems too loud now

for this picture perfect day

instead I kick cans pick up a stick and tap my way

along wooden fence palings

looking for a different way home



One definition of love

love

-verb

to clean the toilet in under 5 minutes on a Saturday afternoon when it may not even be your turn, in order that your partner may vomit into a pristine bowl after a bad case of food poisoning, and to then go to the shops and buy chicken noodle soup and lemonade and let her watch whatever she wants on the television for the whole night.