Ruby Street

Waiting, waiting, waiting ... blogger can be a real blooper sometimes. All these posts into thin air and then they'll arrive on the screen in a gush, days later maybe, as though I'd been pouring out the words continuously. But I'm doing other stuff. Sleeping, eating, working, coughing a lot (that's tedious). I've collected my bodies as they sleep all of them given to a little man and he will presume to speak because I am not … a goddess? … his horn indignant, the passages simmer I stoke the hot walls everybody knows better than me Hope is the violin they play at my death rout but I’m still clicking and this body that ... Keep moving!

The dog out the back, Zaa, keeps howling. He's just lost his mate (ie buddy), an older dog called Ashka, who had to be put down (I'd been watching her for years from our back window and felt close to her - what, through all that glass and distance? yes, I guess so). He's a younger dog, who would naturally have been top dog (he being he) though he never was, as it turned out, and now he only dog. Warm, lazy and slow today. I have to get to a book launch (a big double one) but my sickness keeps me fuzzy and strange. Had I been faceless I would not have felt the colder rain flocks seek me like air if I had risen once ongoing after the quiet

Having some blogger problems ... again! What you see is not what you should see. A sudden change to italics all over the place is not anywhere I could find in my coding. The refusal to publish my latest posts (including this one, frustratingly) seems to take hours and days, not instants. Does anyone else have these constant issues? I'd be interested to know.

Hey, check out Chris Murray's excellent texfiles this week as she's featuring some various works by me as the texfiles Poet of the Week. I am much honoured by this and just love the thought of my poems emanating from Texas, USA.

I've been busy the last few days helping my partner, Annette Willis, with her photography exhibition. The opening night went very well - a bit too well for some of us. So I haven't had time for much else. Also dogged by a persistent flu which antibiotics can't seem to chase away. Annette and I did go for a walk this evening after closing up 'shop'. The gallery is in Clovelly and a short walk to the sea. High seas this week in Sydney. Monster surf. All spray, spume and splash. There's a haze all along the coast and the air has that joyful, scary cool boil of sea cloud and wave boom.

"Coming around the curve of the avenue My thoughts are happy. Yet simply thinking this makes me glum, For if they weren't happy, there'd be more variety: Instead of being happy and glum They'd be joyful and happy. What the heck. Thinking bugs me, like walking in the rain When the bus goes by, a huge wind splattering greasy water. Ambitions and desires? My head's wet. Being a poet isn't an ambition, it's a version of being alone." - Erin Moure , from 'What, me, guard sheep?' in Sheep's Vigil By A Fervent Person , a 'transcreation' of Pessoa/Caeiro's O Guardador de Rebanhos ( The Keeper of the Sheep ).

Two Views of Withens Above whorled, spindling gorse, Sheepfoot-flattened grasses, Stone wall and ridgepole rise Prow-like through blurs Of fog in that hinterland few Hikers get to: Home of uncatchable Sage hen and spry rabbit, Where second wind, hip boot Help over hill And hill, and through peaty water. I found bare moor, A colorless weather, And the House of Eros Low-lintelled, no palace; You, luckier, Report white pillars, a blue sky, The ghosts, kindly. - Sylvia Plath , Collected Poems