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Exultation is

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Exultation is 

The going out

Of an inland soul

To sea

The train leaves Southern Cross right on time at 7.10. No queueing, No Security. No fumes.

The price of a cup of coffee at Southern Cross does not amaze the buyer nor does the drink disgrace the bean. (The cup is of paper; you can’t have everything.) Once aboard, no safety sermons, no-one forbidding standing or moving about the cabin, no weight limits, no serpentine lines of tired, tense travellers with toddlers to repress.

How old fashioned this iron caravan. The carriage rolls, moving in its jazz rhythms forwards, side to side, moving as it did in the rides of childhood, in those long slow rides across time, across the wide, dry land, singing clickclack past silent mobs of kangaroo, putting to flight soundless pink-grey clouds of galah, slipping past indifferent cows looking at me in philosophic enquiry, rolling past stands of eucalypt, no two gumtrees the same, every one the same – whether elegant, smooth and pastel, or scarred, twisted and greygreen – every gum tree declaring I am Australia, I survive, I thrive, I endure, every gumtree bearing, proffering vital knowings.

Only the cabinet has changed. Gone is the sign requesting passengers not to use the appliance while the train is standing at the platform. A press of a button, an airliner’s hiss, and everything disappears without trace.

The twenty-first century city, where they’ve gone about as far as they can go, the city, with its looming concrete overpasses, its car-teeming freeways and tollways, its roar and bustle, its gouging, its uprooting, its foetid air and gritty, its smoking and choking, its babel towers rising up to the heavens, its pavements grey; this great, enfolding and alarming home to millions and to me; this violence, this violation, this nature denying, this horizon hiding, this coded mute cry, this city slips away. And I ride.

The ride beguiles. It seduces. It invites nostalgic romancings of the past, endless retrogression, convenient forgettings of how railways were themselves violators of countryside, the out of control, accelerating agency of dangerous change.

The train to Albury accelerates, exhilirates into the green.

And for all that nostalgia is malignant – 

acceleration is/the going out/of an inland soul/to sea

Past the houses, past the headland/to deep eternity…  

A nod to Yeats, a filching from Paterson and a bow and apology to Emily Dickenson.

A Baby’s Bottom in Buenos Aires

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View of the northern portion of Plaza Francia.I

I

The baby awakens and suckles. The man comes to consciousness in the quiet and dark of the bedroom and hears the regular soft sounds of his wife and his child. Suck, suck, swallow. A pause. Suck, suck, swallow; then the sound of a breath, a breath in two phases – a shorter one high in pitch and a slower one, deeper: the sounds of an ardent drinker and a sleepy feeder. The sounds of the flesh of his flesh.
The man leans on his arm and watches and sees something new. The baby has stopped in mid-suck. He looks up to his mother’s sleeping face and his mouth falls open. He smiles at her, then his arm reaches up and touches her face, plays with her hair. Milk spills from his smile. At the baby’s touch, the mother stirs and sees the smile, reaches for the camera of memory. She wants to capture this moment and to preserve it.
They arrived here in Buenos Aires the day before yesterday. They flew across the world and arrived, excited and anxious and dog tired. The father returning to the city of his birth, the mother with her chick to a  different nest. But the baby has not travelled at all. He is at home in this world which is his mother – his locality are her smells, the feel and the sound and the taste of her.
Father is up early, putting on his work suit, dressing and grooming himself fussily. He wants to present himself well for the  culture of vanity here.
He is dressed and ready early, anxious to make a start, to make a favourable impression. But he is anxious too about leaving. He wants to protect his wife and child: DON’T WEAR JEWELLERY IF YOU GO OUT, DON’T WEAR YOUR EXPENSIVE CLOTHES, DON’T TAKE THAT PRAM – WEAR THE BABY IN THE SLING, DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS, DON’T GO ON THE SUBWAY, DON’T TAKE ANY CAB ON THE STREET – CALL UP AND ORDER ON THE HOTEL PHONE….

The list of don’ts is long. The wife has heard them all before. The peso has fallen, the government has fallen, people are hungry, they have nothing, this isn’t Melbourne, people are desperate, you don’t understand. He’s right – she doesn’t. Continue reading →

Two Propositions at the Zurich Cafe

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Barcelona, Ramblas

Barcelona, Ramblas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Barcelona in the sunshine. Annette and I stroll down the Ramblas, admiring everything. The weather is benign, the street theatre brilliant, the shops alluring, the cafes innumerable. Everything is old and quaint or new and gaudy. Or Gaudi.

The Rambla is famous among tourists for all of the things I´ve mentioned, all the things that seize our attention, and while our attention is seized, our wallets, handbags and purses are also seized, by pickpockets and by bobby dazzlers. The bobby dazzler operates by doing something unexpected or outrageous that grabs your attention at just the moment that his accomplice jostles you and relieves you of your wallet and runs.

The Rambla has played host to many, many shoppers, but none the equal of Annette. Annette has a plan with which she will foil the pickpockets: she´ll spend all her money before they can catch up with her.

And so it is that Annette hits the Rambla running. Single-handedly she rescues the Spanish economy. Her targets are shoe shops, jewellers, children´s outfitters, leather clothiers, and dress shops and dress shops and dress shops.

I am dizzy with admiration. Spain is in surplus. Only the pickpockets have a bad day.

I take my vertigo to the Zurich Café, where I will drink coffee in the sun and read my book, until  Annette, the Goddess of Commerce, exhausts her resources.

Of the lavatory arrangements at Café Zurich, I will say little, beyond noting how cosy it is to squeeze past a line of ladies waiting in the basement, then, upon reaching the immediately adjacent gentlemen´s Lavabos, to note how the charm of proximity is enhanced by the absence of a front door to either the Ladies´ or the Gents´.  Continue reading →