Melbourne Writers Festival 2009 diary: words like triangles

The enraptured crowd at the poetry reading and my teeth close on the nut and it’s too loud, I am too loud, once the sweet surface has melted off.

are here and there, full of torches, trees, ponds,
and menacing ones and death-like withered ones…
Why are these raised up? and resemble
each other never? and are countlessly many?

Buildings and trees and writers. Countlessly many. The way Bernhard Schlink says here with a whoosh behind it. His words are sharp at the top and deep underneath, like triangles.

Why do laughing, crying, and turning pale alternate?

I do them all at once. A cocktail of affect. Something with tequila and salt.

Of what use is all this to us and all these games
who are (after all) great and eternally lonely
and, wandering, never seek any goals?

It is of no use at all, says my badge of the face of Albert Camus.

Of what use is it to have seen so many such things?

To try and not try so hard to absorb them all. To try and lose something and find knowledge in relaxation. To forget the seen things, even. To maybe have literate children forget them too. Or just continue to wrap your arms around them, arms around the earth and jigsaw fits and naked poets. To have split seconds of skin joy, or hugs, or eye contact. Always the smell of pages.

And nevertheless he says much who says “evening”,
a word from which deep meaning and sadness run
like heavy honey from the hollow comb.

Evening.