Somehow I just made enough dahl for twelve people. There’s two of us. Similarly every time I make a cup of tea I pour in just too much boiling water so that when you get to adding the honey & the milk it either slops over just a little, or else you have to lean in and apply a hot, furry sip with lots of breath in it before lifting the cup and carrying it to the desk. Every time it’s a surprise, I was convinced it would all fit. I’d like to think this is my generous nature. But it could be I just lack a grasp of basic physics.
Blog
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controlled by guns
I don’t know why there’s not more discussion about the connection between entitlement and mass shootings. “Something went wrong in my life, something didn’t go the way I wanted it to, I deserve everything to go my way, and when it doesn’t, other people deserve to pay for what I didn’t get.” It’s sickening and it’s in the way men are raised and treated. To those men – the quiet majority – who do not exert their entitlement-from-birth to throw acid in the faces of women who’ve rejected them, ruin the lives of wives who leave them, or gun down random strangers who somehow owe them because life is unkind – I salute you. We need you. Speak up.
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light and shade
Today was a sad and complicated day and I couldn’t get myself off the couch. Life seemed at once too little and too much and I lay coiled under a faded rug that I love, cat curled on top of me, reading one trashy novel after another. Just now with the afternoon sun streaming in I went out to admire the work my incorrigible companion has been making: he is determined to transform the weedy, shaded wasteland out back into a luscious lawn, “so,” he said, “in the summer you can lie down on the grass and read your book.” He went to the hardware store and bought boxes of light-and-shade lawn seed and some kind of strewable powdered fertiliser. He yanked out all the flowering weeds and raked up dried twigs thrown down from the large camphor laurel that spreads its branches over our tiny yard, into a furry, untidy pile in one corner. He made a proper compost pile. The old man who lives next door and spends his days sitting either end of a splendid gold-figured couch in a little garden shed with his best friend struggled over on his stick to see what went on. He is Italian and speaks so little English and in so husky and broken a tone it was almost impossible for us to understand each other. He said, “No rain.” The grass would not grow. “I know,” I said, rolling my eyes and pointing – “Optimist.” “No sun,” he said, indicating the tree with its complication of fine branches. “Yes,” I said. “Maybe we are lucky,” said the man scattering fertiliser. Our neighbour gazed across the yard. He pointed to the huge shaggy mango tree two doors down. “I plant that.” He was immaculately dressed, a feat which in an older person living alone fills my throat with painful tears. He told us his grandchildren used to play in this yard and that is why he’s put the plastic netting up, to protect the lady (Mrs Something, I couldn’t decipher her name) who sold this house to our landlord from having to rescue their balls all day long. He told me his wife died, five years ago, and when I said, “I’m so sorry,” his face was consumed with sadness fresh and undigested. Mrs Something has died too. Now he rents out the top floor of his house to the man who two days ago knocked on our door with five rooting sprigs of Roman basil tenderly wrapped in dampened “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!” paper towel and then kept moist with a layer of cling wrap. He had attached with string a little label written in cursive, “Roman Basil. Very good for eating.” This tenant has filled the Italian man’s concreted yard with pots of herbs and vegetables and sometimes glances out his top window to wave to us on our shaded verandah. It’s a long time since I’ve had such wonderful neighbours. The Italian man rested on his stick, watching. He explained, or I think he did, that he is waiting for his sister who calls every morning from Venice. Talking about the death of his wife and the death of Mrs Something from this house he patted his chest with a knotted hand. “I too, soon.” “Me too,” I said, “eventually. Happen to us all.” “No,” he said, shaking his head, smiling: “92! 92!” It astonishes me how some people can be so self-centred and cruel and others light their eyes on the world like birds resting on a beautiful branch: the fire in their belly is a generous flame, lighting everything around it with compassion and love; were it not for those people I would not know how to make a home of this strange and wonderful, terrible world.
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Wednesday afternoon in the Valley
Two girls in high heels and tiny skirts chatting outside Eye Candy peep show. A dishevelled guy lying supine in the bus stop bench with his arm slung negligently over the side, as comfortable as if he were in his bath. Guy with a ginger beard that starts outside his face, threading it thoughtfully between his fingers in two skeins while his earnest friend tells him something seriously, endlessly.
Driver of a dull gold off-roader, stopped across a pedestrian crossing and mouthing “Ah, come ON!” to people who cross, with the lights, in front of him. The sharp calls of tropical birds, the sun pouring over everything. The old fig tree whose high-walled, circuitous roots resemble the coils of some fire-breathing cave creature. Little boy with his father’s smartphone taking a photo of the orange Lamborghini in the display room window. The old man who closes his door on a dim apartment where the fridge is right in the front entrance. Girl in racing togs, wrapped in a damp maroon towel, who is walking home from the Valley Pool, her feet bare and her hair wet, the muscles of her back gleaming.
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on not being a brand
Had to write a blurb about myself – a bio – for Queensland Poetry Festival. Oh, the horror. Describing oneself & talking about one’s work… is there anything yukkier. I hammered out a couple hundred words, only to discover I had been too verbose (who whuddha thunk?) and they needed a brief 100 words for the website & for the programme, an even briefer 25.
25 words! There is a reason I suck at Twitter. The deadline was rife. In a crowded wifi cafe I pulled something out from under my hat and I feel so boastful about it. Whaddaya think?
100 WORDS: “2014 sees two new releases from Cathoel. Her new poetry collection is hailed by Robert Adamson as the work of ‘a born poet.’ The debut album of Cathoel & the New Government was recorded in New York, Melbourne, and at home, by a collective of twenty-eight jazz, folk, and funk musicians. 50s impresario Bob ‘King’ Crawford on first hearing Hey, Big Splendour said, ‘In my opinion you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.’ Even fresher new work can be found at houseoflovers.com.”
25 WORDS (woot!): “Cathoel writes poetry and jazz. Robert Adamson says, ‘a born poet.’ Overland journal call her ‘a first-rate artist at work.’”
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bushel of sanity
When I walk downhill carrying my computer and the old man sitting underneath the tree nods when I say, marvelling, There’s a lovely butterfly clinging to the underside of that hedge, brown one, just hanging there, and he says, Yeah, they coming round, this time of year, I feel like there is sanity in the world, humanity, generosity, kindliness, sense. When I offer my handful of deep pink lillypillies to the girl with the blond mop who makes my coffee and she has lived in Brisbane all her life and had never heard of nor even seen them, and makes me eat one before she will try, I feel like we are building ourselves a hell in which no one can be happy and everyone addicted to their gaming, shows, anti-depressants, painkillers, grog, psychotic energy drinks, caffeine and sugar and fat, and that we have dragged everything living under this falling cliff face with us – all is lost – there can never be any kind of kind world again except what some few shivering survivors might build, round a fire lit in an old fat 1990s television case, as the waters around them surge with bodies and trash.
The loss is most likely not so cleanly apocalyptic as that, it is rather a creeping, board-meeting, bargain-hunting thing. Since my childhood so much beautiful is gone. We live as though we have forgotten. I remember when you set out for a walk and did not take your phone along: you were untraceable, in the elements; you had stepped into the wild and imagination lit from tree to tree and trundled like an old monkey behind you. But the blond girl in the coffee shop obligingly replays the song that was finishing splendidly when I came in, she is excited, “It’s my favourite song at the moment,” and I read down the sides of their stacked takeaway cups a series of excerpts of someone’s writing, and the clattering jackhammers chatter in the treetops as another giant building is assembled down the street, I can draw no conclusions about anything and I too know by font three thousand different brand names and recognise only a few hundred kinds of plants. The same scarlet beetle drops on my keyboard as greeted me last time, its yellow feelers waving like stalks of pollen in the air, sensing things I cannot know and having no urge I guess to check its emails, write back to anyone, wonder what it is really doing with its life or order more coffee. I feel so hollow inside and so strangely, ridiculously thankful this creature is warming its thin case of body on the quiet warmth of my machine.
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socceroo
Last night, lying on the couch wrapped in a blanket and reading his book, my companion said, thoughtfully, “Now is about the time I wouldn’t mind watching some football.” Ah, if only we had a TV. But we don’t! I decided to act some out for him, make him feel at home. I snatched up a basket that was lying about and clutched it jealously against my ribs, made a scuttled rush across the floor, growling. Arr, I said, growwwwr. Dumped the basket just inside the next doorway and rolled and fell, invisibly tackled from behind. Rawwwwwr, I said: rawwwwwwwr! (That’s the crowd). He watched, marking his place with a long finger. “That was good. But when I say football, really I am talking about soccer.” The European game! Oh, then… I sat down and we went back to our books.
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flowers upturned
Tonight I passed a very low hedge, glossy and cropped to ankle height. Into the shining thicket of its waxy green leaves someone had dropped two white flowers, different flowers, lying face upwards as though growing there… because we are all in the glittering gutter, but some of us gazing at the stars. Earlier in the week I found and have kept the tail of a bright pink balloon, just the knotted end which captures the breath, starfish-seamed and reminding me irresistibly of a belly button. As I walked along thinking of the flowers and remembering the belly button remnant of balloon I saw three people stop at a traffic light. Two large guys wearing black and between them, toes turned out and wearing a gathered skirt, a small woman carrying two hula hoops over her shoulder at rest. She was like a soldier comfortable with her bayonet.
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birthday
It’s going to be my birthday on Saturday, along with perhaps 19 million other people. Good Lord, though – how did this happen so fast? Heard a guy saying the other day, and I think he is right: days are long & years are fast.
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til the day I die
This morning carrying coffee I walked past the hostel where an old Aboriginal man, gold-chocolate skinned and with a round white beard, sometimes sits in a folding chair under the trees waking up slowly. He and I like each other and we often say g’day. “Might get some rain,” he said, and I said, “Feels like it, doesn’t it?” Above our heads the murky trees were cacophonous with bird squabble. These are the rainbow lorikeets who yesterday dumped a couple twigs on my head when I passed them by underneath. “Those birds’ve got something to say about it, too,” I said. Later in the day I was crying in the car, having had some unexpected news. It’s ok. The radio was spurling some country song I had never heard before, the lyrics masculine and earnest. That’s because I listen to Murri Country, 4AAA. Every time they replay their station tag, “Murri Country,” meaning, Aboriginal, Indigenous Country, I think: yeah, a good thing, too. I think of it like a drip drip on the stone that slowly might wear a hole. So the blood can come out, the more justice and kindness. The singer said something that made me laugh, a kind of watery giggle. “I’m not going to stop loving you,” he sang, “until the day I die.” Immediately I saw him in his death bed, primly folded in the neatly pressed hospital sheets, flapping his hand to get rid of the wife who has not realised this means, “but, girl – on that day you are on your own.” “You,” he says calmly, “get lost.” She says, “But we had a contract! You promised! You were gunna love me until the day…” He says, his voice gravelier now but the same voice still, “Yeah, love – actually you misread that.”