MASTORNAVINE, WATCHING THE LAMP

Soren - Watching the lamp won't suffer the bulb, you may as well wait for the switch - It comes hairless, forgets your name - Comes uninvited, laden with gifts - Removes borrowed stockings with a toothbrush - And examines cuticles under seaside strobes - Making amends with cuts and cold coffee sandwiches - While ordering in overdrive entrees with grapefruit juice - Eyes full of lightbulbs, it clicks on the band aid covered heater - Winding up as a timepiece telling fairytales with bad jokes every nineteen hours - In lines watching lamps on lent only legal pads - In a building left standing on a favourite Beirut street.

MASTORNAVINE, YOU CAN CONTACT ME

Soren - You can contact me at the next hotel when I reach another half century - Meanwhile keep gallivanting, and decline all offers to preside over any board of directors, for it would only make you crabby - Keep rotating too those trusty snow chains of yours, all the while maintaining a safe distance from the latest flickering shiny news - By noon yesterday, we found ourselves surrounded by workers’ struggles, eventually derailing in front of a Buenos Aires apartment block - Green uniforms rifled through the science of our injuries, shuffled through the different doors of our correspondence, and kept insisting on pushing through their own version of events they found gathering dust in the archives - Much depended now on the queen in the bed folded up in the best looking blanket, who would be, indisputably, leaving in the morning - Back out on the street again, I suddenly liked the look of every surrounding word burst - Behind a bombshell, a rack of Russian - And of the world’s hurt, I try not to think twice, until that instant when, without warning, a most notorious rifle shoots Roger - Mora

MASTORNAVINE, LATELY SO USED TO SOLITUDE

Soren - Lately so used to solitude sudden company seems strikingly peculiar - Occasionally so much so I need to determine whether the woman lying beside me is part of some elaborate dream - On her suggestion I rub some blood from the cut on my finger into her milk cloudy nipples - Back outside the hotel, heavenly lost in the laneways - Market stalls piled high with dry beans - Salamis in all shapes and sizes - Festooned ranks of cheeses - Early evening corn on the cob steamed in seaweed with lobsters and clams - Mora

MASTORNAVINE, DO YOU REMEMBER

Soren - Do you remember Seasons All November Fire? - Down on the wire, sharing seats with chickens, crossed blackened feet, bales of hay, and wailing toothless peasant women - Clutching their tickets and loudly lamenting their rapidly rootless state - In the mirror the scars resemble maps never before encountered - Leading the curious into corners never before seen - Drawing all desire through the apparition of perpetual doubt - Where everything is always at its beginning and nothing ever comes to an end - Then there's the latest picture postcard that takes turns fanning the brow - As the world awaits the four horsemen and whatever clowns are still hooked to such obsolete harnesses - Further from the owl and the ghost of a cowardly cactus - Still stranded under a yellow moonlit window of memory - Mora

MASTORNAVINE, AS THE STRAPS CUT TIGHTER

Soren – As the straps cut tighter into my arms, eventually I shall start crying –Not tears of pain or sorrow though – But rather laughter – A constant formidable flow shall pour down my face – Help carve out deeper and deeper lines into my features – The floor before long growing more and more slippery beneath what were once the steadiest of feet – While the keeper of the wolves walks steadily behind – Never lagging or needing to run – I’ll catch sight of him occasionally – Coming round a corner in the distance or appearing out of a wood I have only just left – No more than a glance though will I ever get of him – For it is never too long before registering his presence that I turn and start running again – And for years now these wolves have been on the chase – Before they finally catch up – And dive right in – But far from causing me any harm, their bites give me strength – My skin strangely welcoming their latest range of scars – Mora

MASTORNAVINE, IF I AM A CLOCK

Soren – If I am a clock there is a woman sitting in the sand at nine – Crosslegged – Her long blonde hair hanging straight down her back – Perfect posture – A small dog running around her, yelping at the surf – Nearby, a young girl frolics in the water – Kicking the froth around her ankles – Nobody else is around – And now the dog is in the woman’s arms – And the girl stands motionless knee deep in the broken waves – And I must shut my eyes – The now screaming ocean almost too much to bear – Then later, eyes open again, I see the woman still there – Now standing – Now walking toward the dog – And she picks up a piece of driftwood and throws it down the beach – Here comes the girl – They are getting ready to leave – I no longer know what time they are at – And again I have to shut my eyes – Mora

MASTORNAVINE, TENNIS TODAY

Soren – Tennis today down by the river – On the clay court – At one point watching my desperate attempt to reach one of those sly drop shots of hers – Inevitably leading to my falling first through then over the net – The momentum keeping me rolling and making me wonder whether I’ll reach as far as her feet – And she just can’t stifle her laughter any longer – Until finally I come to a stop, somewhat bewildered, and look up at her perspiring face – She says she’s thirsty, but all her water’s gone – I point over back behind my baseline to a near full bottle waiting in the shade – She passes by the net as I slowly get to my feet – I can see she’s watching me out the corner of her eye – As I brush the clay away from my thighs, knees, calves, backside –Tighten my shoelaces – Then go and sit down beside her and watch her gulp gulp gulp gulp down the water - And I bend down and kiss the inside of her thigh where the hem of the pleated white skirt meets her tanned skin – Listen, she says, I can’t think of anything right now I’d rather have in my mouth than water – Later tonight though, she says, when we’re out watching the stars and the rising moon, maybe we could sip some whiskey and make the most of this free time before being summoned back into the fold – And then, she says, before you know it, we’ll be tanned and taut with tickets in our hands and plans plans plans – Mora

MASTORNAVINE, AN ENORMOUS FOG

Soren – An enormous fog completely encompasses a hatred for the outside – As beautiful as anything can be to shatter the calm, though surely there can be no more for us – Who would like to see his seclusion of years? – Thinking at some point in space, a place: others of him – And somewhere within the million miles away, a flash – Light, they say, now carries her – The presence known across the momentary state of death, where light and dark are equal – All the while detesting those who land - Weeping tears falling from ten thousand stony eyes – And she fails to understand that it might be her only chance – Mora

MASTORNAVINE, BORED BUT STABLE

Soren – Bored but stable Anthoniszoon van Aken first counts up the remaining fingers of hope and then subtracts that figure from the complete comedy of distress caused by the lack of a properly sufficient emotional response – Next dividing the resulting nuisance with the number of visions of Ana left to him – Leaving a remainder just within reach – Held timidly in the space between and just above the eyes – Mora

TILL THE LAST TRICKLE

1 - JR - And how goes the camera? - The computer? - Hope they're working for you somehow - And I wonder whether you're doing any reviews - Or have left that malarkey behind - There is a pizza here that tastes as if it has been mysteriously transported straight from the best wood fired oven in Italy - Served by dark haired, dark eyed slender beauties - Kind, gentle - So gentle and kind - Susie is better off - For me monogamy at best has only ever had the slightest of holds anyway - Do you remember those girls when we were about 13 or 14? - Nicola something or another with me - Siobhan something or another with you - It was an Irish name at least - Even though she sounded as if she was mere steps away from ascending to the english throne - God we thought we were in love - At first -And I suppose in a way we were - I don't know about you but I felt in some kind of love with each of their friends too - Yes even Siobhan - There were about seven or eight girls in that group and I desired them all - And listen, I don't think much has changed

2 - No I don't think much has changed at all - There is an older man here at the hostel who says women will always be a torment till the last trickle of testosterone has left and packed up for new climes - Jesus it's a wonder I ever got married at all - Growing from a boy I would observe various men who had sworn loyalty and dedication and who knows what else to the woman beside them - White white white - At various functions - In hotels - Embassies - Wherever - And even before I first needed to shave they struck as belonging to either one of two kinds, as a result of marriage - Or if they were particularly unfortunate, both - Drunks or Idiots - And so I swore eternal bachelorhood - And yet - And yet, here I am - Stuck on the underside of the world - Looking for something likely no longer there - Likely gone, gone for good - Good

3 - Good - She's better off - Besides everything else, I got tired of terrorism too late - What in the end does it matter who did what to whom? - What the hell was I looking for? - Some secret - Likely in the end some silly secret - And then all of a sudden it's too late - Your world, your world in the end evaporates - And yet all the same I can't help but wonder what has become of my papers - Those I sent you - Way back when - And I wonder whether you took a stab at translating any of the ones I never got to - I mean, if so, you could have made Mr Dunnerly proud - Wherever he is - He was a good teacher - He was a good man - Melbourne's mighty cold - A different kind of cold - Wait, there's a Sudanese cab driver I know trying to catch my eye - Later - LA

A SOLITARY PERIOD

A letter from Louis arrives, it's there waiting in the cold metal mailbox when I get back from another day pulling out ivy cascading down a rocky embankment. It's written over three postcards, numbered, and placed in an envelope.

1 - JR - The entries in the journal I've been keeping - Since coming here again - To look for Susie - Have been getting shorter and shorter - And it's not a matter of finding the time - Oh there's time - I'm still at the hostel, and there's an arrangement now for board in return for helping clean the rooms - Vacuum the halls - Sign in new guests - Oh there's time - But still the entries are getting shorter and shorter - So I've stopped - Stopped before I make an entry under a date that has nothing more than a question mark - Or maybe not even the squiggle of a question mark - Just a period, a solitary period - She's gone - Susie - I don't expect to see her again - Or at least anytime soon - Maybe she's somewhere in London after all - I don't know - It doesn't matter - Too late - And yet still an old scene plays over - As I hand over a room key to a couple of Swedish girls in shorts and long shiny tanned legs

2 - An old scene - Back in London - Before all this unfolding - This unravelling - Leaving our London flat one night to follow a lead - A meeting in a hotel - When Susie wanted me to stay and talk it out - Sort it out - But there wasn't time - I had to go - They were waiting - No she said - Something's not right - There's too much left unsaid - Something's awry - Awry she said - Her fine senses kept speaking to her - Prodding her - They wouldn't shut up - She yelled after me down the hall - We haven't finished talking she said - Don't walk away we haven't finished - But to me nothing looked as if it was going to be resolved - It's hard enough to argue with a woman at the best at times - Impossible when time's against you - Everything has to be explained - Clarified - Laid out fully - But the cab was waiting - She yelled after me some more - South Kensington I said to the driver - And left - And the following week I was on a plane to Sydney - Susie was staying with her parents - Or that friend in Clapham Common - I don't know - She was somewhere - It was hard to say - There was no note - And no answer when I called

3 - I thought keeping a journal would help me find her - I was looking for an answer - But I should have listened more carefully on that first day when I wrote that first sentence - Outside at a pub on a headland in the dot town of Tathra - Overlooking the sea - The great heaving sea - The great heaving silent sea - I should have known right then - I should have let it all go - Go over the edge - Into the great heaving silent blue - When I wrote down those first words - Never never never never - That's what I wrote - Shakespeare it wasn't - But it was a start - And I drove on from there - And now here I am months later in Melbourne - Washing sweeping wiping mopping - Smiling - Making do - Like a determined monk - LA

AN AFTERNOON ALL SPENT

JR - Starting with the one between her wedding band and pinkie - With a free hand and lipstick I'd gladly connect - Every mole on her body - Until together we'd reveal and hopefully comprehend - One of the secret words of God we'd lately come to read about - And which I knew, I really knew resided - Somewhere atop her most naked naked flesh - LA

ANZAC DAY ASS

JR - Anzac day ass in abundance - I see Britain by night nearly everywhere I look - Maybe I should have stayed in the city - So tell me, why celebrate so much a sickening defeat? - Here's wily Winston ordering more boys to their slaughter - And they get called heroes but why? - Giddy victims with dreams of adventure if you ask me - Only so much you'd take of boring bare plains in a newly conquered nobody's land - Let's get back to old dart they say - Come on, you antipodeans are still doing it now, capping off university years with a european camp out in some part of old mama for months on end - I've seen earls' court and shepherd's bush let me tell you - And when I think of this I keep seeing the turks waiting up above the beach nigh on a hundred year ago now - I see the dawn and they getting their first brew of coffee going - And their bafflement mixed with surprise at looking down at white boys trudging up the still damp sand - And the turks they pick them off like pigeons - Or wooden ducks at a carnival - And they call this the site of a country's birth? - I don't know about you but I wouldn't ever be calling myself an australian when that red white and blue of the union jack keeps hogging a corner of the flag - Come on now, JR, we were brought up better than that - LA

PLEASE OBSERVE ALL PROHIBITIONS

JR - In Eden again, I was lonely like a lighthouse - It was pathetic - Beer only beat me up all the more - And I forgot where my room was real easy like - Until a playground came up in some kind of clearing - And there were swings, and a skate ramp - And a sign that didn't show signs of moving - A few bags of cement at least keeping it firmly in the ground - Reading: PLEASE OBSERVE ALL PROHIBITIONS - And it reminded me of something I'd imagine to see in a prison yard, except maybe it wouldn't have been so polite - No please - Just a simple instruction - And I wondered what the fork and hay I was still doing here in these parched parts - And I wondered where the fork and hay my wife might be - And I wondered what the pitch forking hell I was doing writing postcards to a boyhood friend I bumped into one cool crispy day in some small shitty mountain town far, far from home - LA

THE FIRES RAGE ATOP THE PLATEAU

It's like I'm learning to read all over again. 

When he called, I wasn't sure what Louis meant exactly, not until I picked up the package from the post office, his handwriting unmistakable. That was more than a month ago now, maybe more. Likely more. 

I haven't left the house much. Only for food and to sell a few things. And I bought a dictionary too, secondhand, from a man fluent in Sanskrit of all things, and apparently Aramaic as well, and Hebrew. We didn't talk long. I had to get back to reading what Louis had sent.

But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Louis called first, a while back. He wanted to let me know he was all right. He was in Victoria, during the raging fires that devastated the region, at a place called Wilsons Promontory, the southernmost point of Australia.

His talk was fast, erratic, disjointed. He mentioned lightning striking twice, homemade picture postcards, Madagascar, the Mark of Cain, and the name Gavrilo Princip on a number of occasions. 'What do you mean you can't place the name? Don't tell me you've forgotten your history lessons already. Here, I'll spell it for you.' At times I wasn't sure if he was laughing or crying. Then the line went dead. A few hours later he called back, sounding considerably calmer. He said he was done with it all. He said that when the fires first made their appearance the first thing that came to mind for him was not his personal safety or the care of others, but a postcard. 'A postcard,' he said, 'can you believe it? A postcard.' Then he said postcard again. Again and again. I imagined him shaking his head in dolorous disbelief.

A postcard. The one he was referring to when he called was circled in red ink and was removed from its numbered place in the manuscript that he posted, and put to the front. Some scribbled lines, also in red ink, were added as well: 'So the flames climbed higher and higher and the eyes of children were beginning to bulge and panic and this is what comes to mind for me, a postcard I translated. Not the horrible heat or the rain of embers or how or if we would all get out of this, no, a postcard. A postcard. It's no wonder Susie left me when she did. I'm staying for the moment in a hostel. I'll call soon. Do with this what you will ... Here, also take copies of the ones I never got to. You might want to finish them yourself. I'm done. But I'll keep the originals of the cards on me, at least for the time being. Now I'm going to drink some wine. Chilled white wine. I want it to flow through my blood like electricity.'

The postcard he refers to reads as follows: Soren - The fires rage atop the plateau, flame in all directions - The surrounding animals attempt to make the best of a bad situation, seeking the only protection they can find, huddled together in the few remaining shallow pools of water, which in days past used to be an uninterrupted stream - Further down, these pools are divided into pods each filled with creatures trying to submerge themselves in this last remaining refuge - Most know they stand at best only a minimal chance of survival, some are now just in it for the game - Then from one of the flames crawls a cat, severely distressed and singed - In a nearby pod a snake makes room for this petrified feline with its forked tongue licking the fur of the puss until it slips off into a deep yet uneasy sleep - And look, there, crouching in the fire, that strange creature unknowingly protected from harm by an even stranger entity whom everyone longs to meet - Beside the snake, the cat - Beside the cat, the zoologist - Beside the zoologist, the first scratches in a new plateau - Mora

WHERE THE BLOOD OF WHALES

JR - In Eden, near Victoria - Where the blood of whales and seals once flowed as free as a bird - Gushing down town streets - OK maybe not gushing - But all the same ghosts here keep the body from going any further in the sea than knee high - Seems a shark haven - I'd ask a local but my ability to speak appears to have gone AWOL - A silent coon can give you the shivers I suppose - Especially one refraining from the safety of a smile - I doubt I'll stay much longer - Move on after the weekend - In passing I hear that it's the national day soon - That might be Monday then - So will go on after that - Flags are everywhere - Flapping from car windows - Perched on roof tops - Hanging from hotel balconies - Silly flag it seems to me - Looks like Britain with the lights out - Look after yourself - LA

A MILTON MUNCH

JR - Drove through alternate sessions of rain and lesser rain - The petrol tank often running close to empty - Silly - Coffee consumed - And ate a steak sandwich in the short town of Milton - Good cut of meat but the onions weren't caramelized like they said they'd be - A couple of pies for the road from another place further down - Okay and a slice of cake - And more coffee came with the stamp - Then briefly talked with the counter cut clerk about forever leaving our loved ones behind in the murk - Before realizing we were both working on different planes - And then drove through a quietly cushioning rain further down into a land where steak and olive tapenade blended with the inexplicable need to ask permission for something specific I could not recall - Otherwise well - LA