Road

We sit like foxes,
trophies for the road side,
baking in the warmth of
the asphalt.

(Image: Garry Winogrand)

Things I remember

1

The clavicles of your chest,

the way they protruded.

2

The pause you made

before you spoke.

(And I never knew if it was nerves or deep thought.)

3

A black cardigan

half fingers protruding from long sleeves.

4

A grasp.

You didn’t laugh hard

and I liked you even though

your thoughts seemed elsewhere.

And while I was planning tickets,

you were planning to buy

a Russian wrist watch

that I never heard tick.

(Published in dot dot dash, Autumn 2010 edition)

(Image: Philip-Lorca diCorcia)

Miscellaneous Voices launch

Karen Andrews has produced a beautiful contradiction: A book of blog entries. While we're in transition, while there is a mild distaste in the literary world for the intangible, this book (a blook?) sort of needed to happen.

Miscellaneous Voices makes no statements but politely shows that literature, the real proper and good stuff, can be found on the inter-web too.

The launch of Miscellaneous Voices is this Wednesday, 6pm sharp, at Readings bookshop in Carlton. I am chuffed to be reading there alongside Stu Hatton, Solid Gold Creativity, Alec Patric, Amanda Scotney, Carole Poustie, Tim Train and Maxine Clarke.

Come along let us read you stories, share a drink, and show your support for us bloggers!

The F words and Jana Wendt

(for Jo)

I was reading the A2 section of The Age today, a toasted hot cross bun in one hand and coffee in the other and the words on Jana Wendt in front of me. But this isn't about Jana, just a word she said in an interview. Just one word, a response to a two word question.

"'Greatest fear?'

'Forgetting'"

Now I suspect Jana might have been referring to forgetting things that make warm and fuzzy imprints on our lives, that fear of forgetting the moments that have warmed the cockles of our hearts. That might have been a more upbeat topic for a blog. But Jana is a serious kind of woman and she got me to thinking about the other things we're afraid of forgetting. I began thinking of the moments that create imprints that drive change in our lives, those events or moments that are not so warm and fuzzy; those things that leave the heart hurt, a little scathed.  Those things that we are afraid to forget. And I wondered why we are so scared to forget ...

So I thought about that over my hot cross bun.

Later in the day my friend Jo, who has lost both her father and mother in the last year, spoke about grief: the way we hold on to the ache, fan its flame when it grows dull to keep it present. That if we let go of the pain the presence of the person, the moments, might go with it, fade and cease to be entirely.

And so we cling tight as the tide rises.

I thought of the moments that change us. The things that elate and hurt and shift the core of who we are, things that ricochet the body, life, into another path. I thought of how many times I've re-branded myself with a memory. Sometimes a reminder not to go there again. The recollections, small and constant punishments. Sometimes to keep the knots in place—the links to moments, moments that no longer serve.

I wondered how many times we drive the nail in, resuscitate that which can no longer draw breath, raise the dead, without realising it fully, until we ourselves are stifled in breath. 

We remind ourselves.

Often, comforted by a cold presence in a room vacated long ago, we camp with fragments, worn fibres, shreds of memory as we reassemble the past, worn and yellowed, anticipating a present or a future without ghosts as we hold tight.

Jo's estranged father was an ex-heroin-addict, an alcoholic, an artist. Tragically brilliant. She said she grieved her dad in the way he lived his life, intensely, held onto his memory firmly and squeezed every drop from the pain.  'Sometimes it's like we're swimming with a weight and we hold onto it knowing we might drown but we won't let it go,' she said. 

Time passes. While we might hold tight maybe we choose do so the next time for less time, with less fear of the forgetting. (A knowing.) (Maybe.)

'I'm grieving my mum now in the way she lived her life,' she said today,  Slowly letting out, letting go of the memory of that last day. 'It's healthy.'