Ruby Street

These temptations & spare Change - something like a flip waiting the station like rain & leaving the Umbrella for the homeless office worker and another spreadsheet Revisions demand the Rising actions speaking louder than Other than the phone Pick me up o southerlies! there is no snow just some sort of ancient kindness Nothing gone begging But we're up for it

At any end it's about Durance And title - tho' calling a spade A shovel near Xmas Gets lost without party Some years end in yellow Some in smoky cumulus This day is a slender Green You can almost see the brush strokes So holding on, like 'holding the man' Is hard But we are not men! Which leaves us Outside, our arms Lifting the minutes of the Rest And holding our own green

smoke becomes us between each space we have learned to keep secrets

Inspired by Tom Beckett's Day Project , here's the jumble of my day yesterday, as my head remember late last night. dream and real, radio evacuate and spiel forgetting on a desk and horizon has forgotten me until I see leaf movement friends leaving excavate work lines white soap, pale body phone phone ascend and phone descend, a fiddle tune, humidity documentary about the Queen a little Urn in cricket hands coffee, tea, Peking noodle, stain ascend, lift, rise fall, incessant voice beginning to crack looking for a last signature eyes still itch long distance till you return own bed, book on Cook sauvignon blanc, sports screen negotiation stalls and flows green dusty air escape, you wish

The much esteemed Cordite is refreshed with issue number 25: Generation of Zeroes . And at last something to come home to, the sixth issue of Divan is finally on line. Some of my thoughts on blogging are here .

Yesterday I saw a bloke holding a teddy bear today, at the Devonshire Street entrance to Central. The man's thin greyish hair and beard matched the teddy bear's fur. That seemed kinda neat, I thought, as man and bear went off in a different direction to mine.

"What if, say, the manner of going over the ground were itself a poetic act, and not merely a prosaic means of getting from one place to another." Paul Carter , The Lie of the Land They have taken away our signs. Many years ago I mourned, ever so slightly, the disappearance from the main city train stations here in Sydney, of the large static indicator boards. Well, no, they weren't static - there was movement. A light would go on beside each station the next train would stop at. Anyone who was a regular could tell just by looking at how the board was lit if the next train was theirs. They didn't have to read, they could just sum it all up in a look. When you're running, the ability to sum up the situation in a glance is important. For some years these major stations have used screen-based indicator boards, which you must read as the names flow by quickly - or you must take a chance when a train is standing there as you rush up. More than once my chance has been w...

"The more daily life is eroded ... the more we must counter this trend with complex, initiatiary sets of rules ... A work, an object, a piece of architecture, a photograph, but equally a crime or an event, must be the allegory of something, be a challenge to someone, bring chance into play and produce vertigo." Jean Baudrillard , The Intelligence of Evil: Or the Lucidity Pact , (trans Chris Turner)

Sakura , Susumu Yokota ...

Literary Histories [Le storie letterarie] I have always been of the opinion that Shakespeare was a cooperative. That for his jests he always used charlatans like himself in genius but careless of everything else except money. Survival can't swallow too much. At times it digests a platoon, at others it distills a few syllables and throws a monument in the wastebasket. It reproduces like mushrooms, you might find a whole lot of them at once, and then you are empty-handed for a whole day, or a year or a century. It depends. Eugenio Montale (trans G. Singh)

My everyday soul plays like the wind in litter and noise. Am I soul-less? Maybe so. I was asked on Friday afternoon: 'Are you an artist or a bureaucrat?' I have to say that, by this stage of a rather long day, wearing outwardly my bureaucrat's hat, I was rather tired of sitting in an auditorium listening to the usual shots at my day job, beloved of hack journalists in this country (who can forget the 'fat cats' line, flogged around many years ago now) and those more interested in deferral and distant academic pontification. So I replied, rather tartly I must confess, 'I'm both. Is that a problem?' My interrogator, someone I did not know, took a deep breath (I said I was very tart by this stage) and then came out with questions along the line of, what happens to your, and I quote, 'artistic soul' - in other words, you couldn't possibly work as a bureaucrat and be an artist as it would damage your art, irreparably, I was to suppose. My next tar...

I wish I did not need this green plastic bag I would walk on sand and carry nothing if I did not need action and reaction. Rope would be useful but not steel I would love the grain of sticks, deltas of leaves But not the noise of this bag

Questa sfera arida parte ogni discorso e ogni poema; e ogni viaggio attraverso foreste battaglie tesori banchetti alcove ci riporta qui, al centro d'un orizzonte vuoto. "From this arid sphere every discourse and every poem sets forth; and every journey through forests, battles, treasures, banquets, bedchambers, brings us back here, to the centre of an empty horizon." Italo Calvino , The Castle of Crossed Destinies (translation by William Weaver)

... this is a tough journey hussey enjoys vultures monitor attitude devour uncertainty angels appeal & grunt they have longevity and bowling brains bones ... Nick Whittock from "magnum ponting" What a magnificent match! Whosoever says cricket is boring does not know the way of the way, in all its reversals and dramas .

1755 To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee. And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few. - Emily Dickinson

Reversal is the movement of the Way; Weakness is the usage of the Way. All creatures under heaven are born from being; Being is born from nonbeing. Lao Tzu , Tao Te Ching (trs Victor H. Mair)

1463 A Route of Evanescence With a revolving Wheel- A Resonance of Emerald- A Rush of Cochineal- And every Blossom on the Bush Adjusts its tumbled Head- The mail from Tunis, probably, An easy Morning’s Ride- - Emily Dickinson

"In intention, the ego progressively loses its ego individual character and finds itself carried to a universal value that makes it escape from the strictly ego form of the ego . It is, nonetheless only through intention that the formless ego becomes self-consciousness. Thus the ego is a transient fact, not only as a result of its chance birth and its approaching death, but also because the process that determines it is also the one that exhausts it. it is impossible even to reach a clear distinction between determination and exhaustion. The determined ego is, by the sheer fact of determination, an exhausted ego." Georges Bataille , Critique of Heidegger from Bataille's original manuscript, Biblioteque Nationale de France (trs Stefanos Geroulanos). In October 117 , Summer 2006.

The Trees "Because we are like tree trunks in the snow. They appear to lie smoothly, and with a small shove one should be able to push them away. No, it is impossible because they are firmly bound to the earth. But see, even that is only appearance." Kafka , 'The Trees', from Contemplation , (trs Kevin Blahut)

"The poetry of the invisible, of infinite unexpected possibilities - even the poetry of nothingness - issues from a poet who had no doubts whatever about the physical reality of the world." Calvino - on Lucretius, from Six memos for the next millennium .