We fixed binoculars on it.John the Bird Whisperer’s two zero-in guesses—the black kite’s helicopter spin, or swoop of eagle, a wedgetail obsessed with high mysteries. Who brought the strongest lens, the steadiest hold,that cloudless morning in Canberra? Still autumn at that point, going into winter. post-fireand pre-fire. A planet glorious,upside down and inside out and…
gone to ash. Someone told us the pond no longer went silver in wind. Someone told us Eucalyptus melliodora is melleus (honey) and odora (sweet smelling) though nowhere in the house even under such trees did it not reek of the grate. John the Bird Whisperer: that golf course saved this whole section of city….
I kneel by the redwood cutting basal roots,taunt slivers that shoot up from the base,and think how this tree is always reproducing.And if I’d birthed that child, the last, or the one before,they’d be grown now, cast off from the shoreof my mothering. There’s an odd comfortin knowing my children would have left me eventually.No…
I. As a child, my mother boosted me into a dumpster of damp discarded library books. I fished outlimericks, and Langston Hughes, and stack after stack of Hardy Boys. Years later, when I came out to my mother, behind a closed door, I cried like a wolf. I didn’t know it then, but there are…
and then he turned it upside down in the garage where he consideredits half-painted, dull fuchsia, cast-iron belly and drain hole fixedwith what looked like a sawed-off copper snorkel, and how it restedon its gunwales that now were gutters. Something to behold so he beheld it. Its eponymous feet he arranged on a table, like…
I once believed we all have one chance to love deeply,an opportunity not only in the business of flesh and heartbut in the loneliness of the soul, and if we miss it,as I thought I had on June 15, 1976, waking up in my roomthat fronted Half-Moon Lane, Herne Hill, London,listening to the dieseling idle…
Looking for the strange places, we becomeenvious of whatever crawls from underrocks and out of seashells. We invented thisnew ocean, this nameless waterway to anothersundial strewn city. We look for all the minusculetheaters enacting moss-covered recitationsand pastoral renditions. This must be whatwe wanted, what we planned for and opened a newmine to locate. It makes…
Translated by Gustavo Pérez Firmat Life is too short. We’re always running late.Not enough days in our livesto learn anything. You wake up,you hug your girlfriend,you have breakfast, you work,you eat, you sleep, you watch a movieand you don’t even have timeto read Seneca and convince yourselfthat there’s nothing in the worldthat can’t be fixed….
Translated by Gustavo Pérez Firmat She gave me a brief, hard hug,one of those you feel downto your toenails, a mortal leapinto life, an incandescentcaress, the kind that doesn’t lastbut scalds, sudden and fleeting:a spell rather than a squeeze.To be embraced like this oncein a while is irrefutable proofthat, sometimes, life providesarguments against loneliness.
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