Concrete Tuesday
happens only in winter, beginning
in a narrow street
in orphaning light
where cars shrink into their
parking spaces,
nosing each other like dogs,
under a sky without colour, damp
and clear. From dirty holes
in the bitumen, bare veins thrust
into the sky,
devoid of leaves. Up and down the
street the sound of doors
snapping shut, the sounds of
hunkering down, of rattling blinds,
the shiver of keys, terraces
diminishing into themselves,
and I realise this is the kind of
day where I know
what it's like to be part of a
species,
a day that doesn't belong to me,
but to animals and their ignorant thrall
to DNA, ours and theirs, to the
fear in rustling leaves
as my shadow passes them, to cancer
and IVF,
to fucking in the cold weltering
moon
of a bedside lamp and finding in
shadows
the face of a lost or forgotten
loved one,
to bronchioles opening and choking,
to the fug of sleep
and the gritty, uncovering dawn, to
the plucking of dew
and the slow gather of fog, and the
gutters of fast trickling,
to a bole with its half-moons of
amputation,
to a statue of father, mother and
child, moss-stained
and faceless, to the fluorescent
burrows
in which we excel and word, to
running and to the flight
of cat’s eyes as the lane changers
hone their art,
to cigarettes, to the minarets of
absolute capital.
On this day, people are like cars,
on high beam
and nudging each other and passing,
ragefully,
low clouds dwarfing the personal,
clouds low in the sky’s brow
creased in conversation,
all the colours of the day chosen
from a palette
of reticent tones and shades.
It’s a day I negotiate. As one does
a hillside
or a contract, each as slippery as
the other,
and dealt with as with a minor
catastrophe,
not the sort that leaves knuckles
red from wringing
or memory cauterised, but is like
the slow collapse
of habitual happiness into
something more provisional,
into a set of ideas which can’t be
classified
or extraordinary states of mind
unshared
except in retrospect, in the way
that each generation
finds the music of its successors
alien,
a set of special horizons in which
we zoom about,
bucking against the statistics and
confirming them.
The gutters peeping rain seem
almost spontaneous.
On such a day as this I wish I were
following someone,
a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter
which,
and he or she is wearing a suit
of mirrors which throw off
prodigiously the details of the day:
the city and its incisions,
barbaric and cultured,
no choice but no choice, only
consequent actions,
walking with gusto and throwing the
world back at itself,
the world cut up into parts,
becoming the ultimate fashion accessory,
drawing a crowd who would follow
the mirrors
up the rancid lane where next to
the butts and syringes,
a sign is chalked on a piece of
plywood
that looks like a ripped out heart,
saying
‘Concrete Tuesday’ and an arrow
which,
as it happens, is pointing straight
at me.
While I was in Sydney recently I
hopped into the reading at Mr Falcon’s Bar in Glebe. What an excellent reading
run by Micah Horton Hallett on the last Wednesday of the month, or is it the
fourth Wednesday? Oh dear, I wish I could remember. I discussed it with people,
about how it clashes most of the time but not all the time with the reading at
Don Bank. Anyway it is a raffishly charming venue and the night I was there it
had two excellent featured poets – Andy Quan and David Musgrave. I was in a
Sydney frame of mind, remembering Sydney, and then David Musgrave read Concrete
Tuesday – it really hit the spot. So I invested in his eponymous book.
Some astonishing work in this book.
It had me on the edge of my bus seat as I headed down to Canberra the next day.
http://puncherandwattmann.com/books/book/concrete-tuesday/
