You're made of light.

Light so bright the night will send you away to play with day.

Excerpt from Ian McEwan's 'Amsterdam'.

"He left the piano and poured some coffee which he drank at his usual place by the window. Three thirty, and already dark enough to turn on the lights. Molly was ashes. He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die. After the coffee he recrossed the room and remained standing, stooped over the keyboard in his overcoat, while he played with both hands by the exhausted afternoon light the notes as he had written them. Almost right, almost the truth. They suggested a dry yearning for something out of reach. Someone. It was at times like this when he used to phone and ask her over, when he was too restless to sit at the piano for long and too excited by new ideas to leave it alone. If she was free she would come over and make tea, or mix exotic drinks, and sit in that worn-out old armchair in the corner. Either they talked, or she made her requests, and listened with eyes closed. Her tastes were surprisingly austere for such a party-loving sort. Bach, Stravinsky, very occasionally Mozart. But she was no longer a girl by then, no longer his lover. They were companionable, too wry with each other to be passionate, and they liked to be free to talk about their own affairs. She was like a sister, judging his women with far more generosity than he ever allowed her men. Otherwise they talked music or food. Now she was fine ash in an alabaster urn for George to keep on top of his wardrobe."

Nightminds.

peak hour traffic
gridlocked, stuck
jammed in sealed avenues
tree-lined
outlined
turning left. left. left.
halted, jarred, tumulted
until sleep finally comes

blackened streets
raspberry plums
jumping castles

deep dark drums
deep dark drums

"Sugar, sit a while."

This song comes on and I can hear the clink of wine glasses, the cool sea breeze over goosebumped skin. The stuffy air of enclosed spaces, hot skin dancing over one another. Tasting each other's food, sweetness of chocolate-coated strawberries, burning bourbon. Crisp clean shirts, the softness of belt holes. The sharp sound of a ringing telephone, the familiar car motor. Turning off lights. Burning candle smells, fingers through hair.

The Great Marinade.

There is something that draws me to the ocean, beyond aesthetics or culture. It's not the beautiful bodies, though they are nice, nor the white sand, though that is nice too, but something deeper and baser. In the way the horizon flattens into deep blue, I feel like there is a future. There is a sense of moreness and floorlessness, of vastness and everlastness, of a life without wheels and currency and gravity. The roll of the tide, the pulling and pushing of the arms of the sea gives me a freedom down to my core. It's the saltiness, the abrasion and healing. It's the beneath, the through and the all-encompassing. I am lost in the here-and-now. I watch fish watch me and there is an exchange of what-ifs, of how-ares, of mutual fascination and mutual disunderstanding. I am not here nor there, but everywhere and everyhow, everywhen and everynow. The coral so bright, the urchins and stars, the sharks, somewhere, but not too close. There is impending doom, yet a chance at salvation. In the water, we are equally heavy and equally as stupid. We breath sporadically and with difficulty, always resurfacing, birthed into light and solidity.

As I heave away from the ocean, stumbling mortal again, cutting feet on rocks and spluttering, I turn back toward the horizon and gasp. I see, I see!

23, 78, 102, 107

Each morning I would stand and wait for my bus on William Street while the remote, jovial city yawned, stretched and readied itself for another December day. I'd stand on the grimy bricks outside McDonald's watching the homeless man rummage through the bin for fatty scraps. Numbered green buses would rumble past towards the slick river, leaving puffs of choking smoke to mingle with the meat and oil smells coming from the glass doors behind me. Business women emerged from the take-away joint clutching cheap hot coffees with sincere dependence, their clickity-clack heels carefully stepping over drains.

The puffy clouds parted and a blanket of pure golden light instantly warmed the street, thrown off the great glassy skyscrapers and sending weary, warm just-woke-up workers reaching for sunglasses. German tourist girls with backpacks and deep yellow tans passed the knick-knack shop across the street where the Korean worker was arranging wheeled tables in careful rows. To my right, the mobile phone shop guy was emerging for his third morning ciggy, brune and angular with a dramatic lean against the doorway and a gaze that had seen it all.

I turned away to join a commotion and when I looked again, I met his eyes from my bus, two background characters within the short story of a small beachside city with an azure winding river and a history yet to be written.

but only until*

lover, be careful, your tea is too hot
one day we'll decease and then we shall rot
the worms will devour our eyes and our hair
our dreams live no longer, thinner than air

we never did meet, I sawn't you again
I checked all the trains at a quarter to ten
no platform'd you in it, no luggage sat still
I waited and waited, but only until

the stationguard whistled, and then it was clear
our now had not come and nor were you here
forever is through, our tomorrows alight,
the mice darted over the train tracks all night

lover, amore, your tea remains hot
you told me you loved me and yet you prove not
I caught my plane home, alone with my sores,
you lingered in shadows and then you caught yours.

*pickled in espresso martini

He sat very, very quietly and watched her dance.

we'll follow the road

lover, your tea, your tea is now cold
one day we’ll awaken vacío and old
the rivers will drift us far into the night
dragging the silt and throwing the light

don’t tell me your plans, we have only now
the hair in my eyes and the sweat on your brow
roll down the windows, we’ll follow the road
you forget what you said and I what I knowed

the acres of forest run cool and profound
the deserts will swallow you to harder ground
I’ve been to those places, I’ve worn out the maps,

I've walked cobbled streets till my sandals collapsed

lover, amante, your tea is now cold
we’ve spoken too long and acted too bold,
you’ll miss your plane, forgetting the time
I’ll find a new café and then I’ll miss mine

Traces.

Sometimes it turns into a guessing game with the lines.

On cool evenings sitting up in bed with the bedside lamp glowing, I would have a book nestled in the warm valley of my lap. My knees drawn up into a doona hill, one hand would hold the book open, and the other a pen out of habit, flicking, biting, poking, ready to jot rare notes onto the pages on the bed next to me. But mostly to hold onto something, mirroring the birth of the book.

It would be warm and cozy in the room, a cave of reverberating words by Kristeva or Lyotard, and then I'd turn the page softly and there would be lines. Phrases underlined, usually by a scholar's pencil or first-year's hurried pen. Sometimes it would be a fairy line, thin and light grey like autumn clouds, as if subconsciously made while thinking or discussing the point with a pencil on the page. Other times they would be great gashes of spread lead, veins through the ink by one with conviction, confidence, criticism. If I'd be lucky, the annotator would leave crosses in the margins for emphasis. Or asterisks, or hyphens, or ticks. If contempt flared, great question marks sneered in the blanks on the sides. Notes would vary in handwriting, from young to old, male to female, teacher to student, hurried or relaxed. Even languages altered according to the subject.

And finally, after attempts to draw my concentration back, I would cease to see the text, but drift back to the markings, etchings, possessions after print. My mind would tick off the academic staff who may have prepared this week's lectures using this very book. How many had their own resources in their offices. What units were on offer on the subject this semester. How old the writing looked. Whether it had seen a war.

And then I would think of the students, my colleagues, and who had borrowed the book and why they kept their pencils at hand while reading it. Whether the difficulty level suited an undergrad or postgrad. Were they eating forbidden lollies in the library at the time. Were their parents still alive. Would death show in their scribbles?

I've found post-it notes and bookmarks pointing every which way between the pages. I've seen blood, coffee and juice stain the sheets. I've had postcards fall out. Photocopied passport info pages, leaflets, receipts. I've found business cards. Cafe vouchers. Flight boarding passes. Snatches of lives, desires, regrets. Snatches of humanity.

Each of the bundle of sheaves has a breath that absorbs the living world. Recyclable, circular, cyclical as the seasons.

Sewn in.

I don't know where to put my hands when I speak to her. Painfully aware of my extremities when we meet, I feel the sudden need to hide behind myself or perhaps hate her instead. Fingers crawl up and down my arms, finding pockets, tags, loose threads to cling onto. My feet shuffle into non-verbal conversations while I stammer my way through not telling her what I need to.

The photocopier whirrs. I pull off a button.

I take coffee with no sugar because there is no sugar to put in my coffee. Sharp and bitter, I talk too much and incoherently. The words throw themselves at and off the walls and into the sink to be washed.

The doors lining the corridor mark a game of cuckoo as they open and shut all day. I often walk past my door, thinking the corridor is longer than it is. In one week, sitting at my desk, I will recognise the professors outside according to the weight of their step.

We dusted the bookshelves and then they disappeared.

The dreamer and the realist.

I had a drink with her again last night. Seventeen years of friendship and we still manage to see each other every few months so I can be content to know she is still governing the world and she can be relieved to know I am still analysing it. I had a lemon, lime and bitters and she had a coke and I thought back to that other time when there were four of us around the table. When things were riskier, lights were dimmer, and we rimmed our eyes with kohl. Back then two bottles of wine had been between me and her. Sometime after I puked grape juice in the bathroom and came out trying to look as suave as possible, thinking I should have eaten and grateful that I had not, I prayed nothing would change.

Across from us was a bunch of mothers and their babies - in a pub, things had changed, had they not - all talking and laughing and leaving me and her to speak of important life things like mortgages and moving overseas. She has a man the same age as he was when we began our friendly liaison, oh the irony, and I had to give it away when we were in the car rolling towards her place. 'We were close, probably too close,' and I waited but there was just a solid quiet of the sort that two old friends can bask in and save for later to think about when the lights are red or you sit peeing in meditation. And I told her about the other one, the one who has the baby, and she gasped so that things changed forever and could never go back.

She will move into her house and I will sell mine. She'll give presentations to government types and I'll offer hot coffee to my bleary-eyed students. One of us might conceive and our parents will die. We will get old, the city will gain energy and lose us. The pub will always be there and months later one of us will write 'I think it's time' and the circles will merge into an inclusive venn again.