Snapshots Of A City

1 Carlton, 3 a.m.
Carlton after rain;
wide moonstreets.
A long silver tongue, the road
snaps up nightcars
wandering through intersections —
random ants at a leaf node,
a nerve end.
Streetlamps buzz with cold radiance:
fireflies stuck on damp, black paper.
The stillness is humanless —
four hours, a century away
from dust, voices, the tumult of day.
2 Chadstone, Afternoon Streets
Driving, eyes half-alert,
through streets sharp with spring light.
A sudden image — sapling's shadow
on a white brick wall —
glances into my mind,
unshutters it.
The shadow is classic, spare,
a candelabrum edging into life,
stretching outwards like a vine
from its sword-straight stem.
In this instant of growth
it leaps
asymmetrical as fire.
My mind clicks,
traffic lights flash, fade,
the afternoon is strafed with shadows.
3 East Burwood, The Highway
Dark double backbone,
the highway rides down the hill's
long slope. Cars swarm past
the drive-in: dream oasis
hedged by brick veneer.
On the hill's crest,
a private school nestles
snug as a toupee …
Over playing fields patched
with lifeless earth,
two tractors swerve and circle
trailing dust and seed.
To the left, a small wasteland
has somehow survived:
sculptured in brown light,
a horse stands stock-still
among ferns, weeds, spring grass.
4 Malvern, 1976
Two days after the lights were installed,
a major accident: a shock, a scar,
in this close-webbed, familiar terrain.
Doors hanging open, seats ripped out
as at a car dump — someone's happiness
vandalised by a hair's-breadth chance.
Around the scene, dusk traffic milling
slowly, with the discretion of token mourners:
askew, not to be touched, a cave now
that once held other, vanished life,
a "family' Holden with the remnants
of a family — a doll, a scarf —
lying exposed to safe, alien eyes.
5 St. Kilda, Saturday Night Casualty, 1963
Passing through Mordialloc once,
I closed my eyes, dreaming,
and opened them
as I was sliding from an ambulance.
Later, recovering on a white table,
paralysed by the cold strangeness of the place,
I heard a girl ask for a cigarette:
"I'll pay you for it,' she said, trembling,
narrow-lipped,
her boyfriend bashed and pulpy,
looking like a write-off case
after a party fight. "They're friends …
Jim's really his best friend' —
the words are fugitives from a cartoonist's
black balloon.
From the nurse, managing this, her familiar
disaster area, a glint of wryness.
6 South Melbourne, Fishley Street
In our old street
a massage parlour came and went
without our knowing.
"Is this … Is this the place?'
an immaculately suited businessman
had asked — nervous,
knocking at the wrong house one night.
Eventually, the pieces fitted, clicked.
("We wondered why they'd paint
the windows black!')
Complained to, the police acted.
("More nerve than sense setting up
with a Police Station opposite!')
Perhaps …
So down came masseusses, vibrators and all,
and vanished into thin, hot air
… to materialise elsewhere
with more comings and goings on,
black windows, expensive cars —
something for neighbours to chat about.
7 West Melbourne, The Docks
On the road round
the docks where
for twenty-five years
my father worked,
leaving/arriving
before midnight/after dawn,
iron arteries bulge
from concrete walls
gouged out by rain
and the rumble of
transports hurtling
towards Footscray Road,
the dead grind
of Melbourne's
western beat.
Water stains seep
down concrete walls,
barbed wire billows
like a mist — walls
to hold in cargo, goods,
as a concentration camp
holds men and women.
Outside the walls,
acres of containers stacked,
invulnerable to theft,
on open ground.
Within the docks
a building rises
like a huge, blackened
wall, or grandstand.
On the t.v. news,
days later, I saw it
bombed, collapsing
in five seconds
into a mound
of smoking waste:
razed monument
to its own nothingness.
8 Richmond, Renovated Terrace
A toilet with stained glass windows;
the earth-pastels of acid-scrubbed brick;
oak panelling buffed to a reflecting presence
(bright sloe eyes in wobbly amoeba heads).
An antique fireplace burns contemporary wood;
above, selected objets d'art flown in
from soon-to-vanish cultures …
Church and barn and showroom — but, best of all,
a "home': an elegant setting for chats
on interior decorating. At times, the doors
and floors seem more alive than we are …
Sink plenty of grog because, later in the night,
those walls start staring at you. Last time
I was here, I heard a forest breathe.
9 Parkville, Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital, 1966
At the end of the road
an empty room,
millions of stillborn phantoms and fantasies,
another hour of boredom: a tired man's
calculated anger to be suffered patiently
by this patient.
As I sit, nervous, his brain, like a thermometer
measures the temperature of my sanity.
The room feels and tastes
like a glass of cold water.
Perhaps the world itself
is a giant glass of water
to be taken patiently, cautiously,
in small, neat sips?
"Sometimes,' I say, "sometimes,
I feel I'm just a pimple
on the backside of the universe.'
He taps his pencil and doesn't take the point.
When I go we have paid each other in kind;
for the bad faith of indifference
I leave the ash of a dozen cigarettes —
he has wasted, as I waste, my dead time.
10 South Yarra, Consultation, 1978
In the silences
watching the fishtank,
waiting for thoughts to swim in or out …
Late afternoon crosses your ageing, moon-like face:
among your masks, rope hangings and dried flowers
unmasked, restive, grumpy.
I speak haltingly:
words, bubbles of air, rise.
Like a cash register, your eyes
ring up the bullshit sign.
Immortal in your safari suit and Quaker beard,
that padded armchair huge and consoling
as your bank account,
no doubt,
you speak of mysticism, the Wisdom
of the East.
Please don't re-incarnate yourself
in the next psychiatrist I meet.
11 Hawthorn, At "Val's'
In the half-light,
fingers trembling with static,
she puffs out discontent.
Her friend leans
with a truckie's heaviness,
waits on her mood:
hair cropped, hand cradling
the warm red wine. Smoke spirals:
each sits the evening out
over a chequered cloth,
shadowed by flickering lamps.
12 Fitzroy, Gertrude Street
In the vegetarian restaurant:
zucchinis on flowered plates,
the human hum of eating, talking …
Then everything stops.
The girl with chalk-white skin,
a baby's startled eyes,
is screaming.
Her family shuffle to their feet,
with saddened faces take her
out into the street.
There the night closes round her,
within her head the rushing sound
grows louder.
A girl howls inside
a pebble on Gertrude Street.
13 Albert Park, By The Lake, 1966
The lake: scenic, kidney-shaped,
concrete edge …
From the restaurant,
two businessmen step with fake
freshness from their lunch.
One squints, lights up, drags deep:
"Not a bad lookin' dame,' he mumbles
through Bogart teeth.
His full-fleshed companion eyes
me like an after-dinner mint,
then veers towards the car park
jingling keys. Tyres screech.
Past tidy sportsfields hurtling
they take their ease.
14 Camberwell, The Junction, 1978
Red light/junction/peak hour:
microphone seized, talked into, dropped;
car jerked forward, braked; fingers running
down cheeks, nails scraped on knuckles,
quicks of fingers pressed down …
the body language of an absent mind —
taxi meter turning over/making money/using time:
voice on a tape
brain in a valise
body oozing power
big blue limousine
15 North Melbourne/St. Kilda/Carlton
In alcoves of the Victoria Market
derelicts, summer and winter, are sitting.
They wait with faces open, wounded
and wrinkled, like pierced hands.
But the sun still shines at Luna Park.
In a suburb full of oral smiles,
he grins loud and longest of all.
Money walks into that whirling emptiness,
and comes out empty … And his grin
is long and loudest of all.
On a clean brick wall in Carlton
is written
RISE ANGRY
MAN/WOMAN
— something to come home to,
something of permanence,
amid the city's gleam and grease.
16 East Melbourne, Homosexual Party
A stringy woman
in '50s frippery and war paint
leads up the stairs to a room
filled with bizarre voices, flytings,
cockfights:
"You poofter, my God, you're a poofter!' —
insult or invitation or celebration
— or all three — throbbing through
the somehow empty house.
Mere straights backed into the sidelines
are reduced to humble spectators,
vulnerable as a police line-up parade
fearing, craving identification
from the human spotlight of an eye
as the open/closed secret billows
and unfolds, artificial flower
in a fishtank …
Much leant on, squeezed in near the dips,
I become at last philosophical,
trapped for three hours in one-way
conversations ("Art is work, hard bloody
work,' says my neighbour, kneeing me).
A stripper,
plump professional hourglass,
a refugee from private school teaching:
"Just couldn't handle it,' she sways,
throwing her head back,
gat-toothed,
belly shaking,
having, as she knew she would,
the last laugh.
Schoolgirls — overweight,
scruffy — huddle in cool pretend cynicism …
Suddenly I remember
seeing ten-year-old girls
go go dancing at a sideshow —
painted mechanical dolls gyrating
innocently with the movements
of experience …
2 a.m.
We leave calm-eyed
leave the costumes, voices,
long silences, all the people
wearing like us
these strange human faces.
17 Parkville, University Gallery, Friday Night
Dry rain fills the spaces between buildings.
In the bookshop, books outnumber people twenty
thousand to one …
Across the way, a new gallery
inside old skin: austerity, elegance, stone stairs
leading to where — the hidden joker in the pack —
Norman Lindsay bursts into life from flaky walls,
his demon lovers with glittering eyes tease
plump, coy women for a cuddle and thrill …
(Elegant, austere, his portrait on the wall.)
The opposite room: the ladies and monsters
of Arthur Boyd stare their blueness and blackness
into your eyes, behind painted barbed wire
watch you startle and wander around the empty hall.
Stark yawning figures filled with emptiness, or peace;
skies feather-bright as angels watching over
lovers and watchers. Beneath trees dry as matchsticks,
haloed in iris air, human creatures clasp
to themselves, each other,
life's burning darkness.
18 Huntingdale, At Huntingdale Technical School
A dangerous day for kites
but we are out here
in the school's back field,
a Greek girl, a Chilean boy
at their "Migrant English' lesson.
I sit on a long as the dramas unfold:
kite caught in a tree then
crashing down, will and skill
played against furious winds.
Excitement unlocks memories
which soar and falter, tug
aloft in fitful speech.
A kite flying in Chile …
A kite flying in Greece …
Later, the describing in
cautious sentences. But today,
delight, simple silences
… and, sometimes, words.
19 Box Hill, Intersection
Right-turning cars lined up,
indicators ticking, flashing,
seconds ticking, too … and minds,
behind blank, fixed eyes.
Lights change against their backdrop —
an inescapable sea of grey.
In his taxi at the taxi stand,
a young man, bearded, head bowed,
raises a flute to his lips,
his eyes closed, pretending privacy.
Into the insistent, carbonating drone
comes the pure air of a young man's
dreaming: life rhythms, unfolding
fantasies, pierce a city's death-music.
20 East Malvern, Typing In My Garden
With nose pointed
towards the Yarra's waters,
a helicopter is burring through the air.
Its cabin could be cradling
some golden superstar of power or money,
eyes twinkling in the cardboard firmament,
mouth twisted slightly into a brooding smile …
And is whoever-it-is-up-there
showering power and money on us today?
I look up and see only
blue air
and the most green leaves of trees …
Close-by, bees gather little bits of money
from snowdrops: stripping them down,
searching their bell-like pockets
until, loaded up, travelling in fleets,
they buzz it home to the bank.
From this distance,
in this brightness, the plane
drifts like a silver bubble
through the pea blossom on the tree.
Its nervous drone recalls the sound
of speedboats on the lake:
a zoom in diminuendo, then the return
of maddened wasps,
blades churning through air and water …
almost as noisy as the birds:
chasing, finessing in spring light,
a complicated menage of five squabbling
in the branches of a bush,
a blackbird flicking dead pine needles
with its beak …
Later, there are different sounds.
Outside in the street, the terrified
yelp of a dog in pain, then,
"Bad dog! Bad dog!' More yelping.
Next door, the Sunday hose
is squirting the flowering faithful
with holy water. And now it is time
for the sacrament of afternoon tea.
But the last word goes to stroppy
young birds plump with feathers
and berries and cheek — prima donnas
budding from strong, thick branches.