SEPTEMBER SONG Poem by Laurence James Duggan

Bill Doggett and Earl Bostic: Trading Licks
a great compilation
always reminds me of Ken
probably still at work

in Adelaide, though thinking by now
of coffee and writing

at Baci's (or the Flash),
Hindley Street.
Here it's hot

unseasonable September
leaves of brown
come tumbling down

Friday evening of the poetry fest

I'll stay home
watch the light dim over Bulimba
cook mushrooms
a la Grecque

(bougainvillea a mass of crimson
on the balcony, the door
waving in the wind though held
by an elastic fastener).

The versifiers will be hot . . .

I mean hot, not
‘hot'
(a seven part performance
of the deadly sins sounds
deadly)
but it will be great

to hear what the poets in Sydney (and Melbourne) are doing
these days.

Bostic's ‘Flamingo':
that great blast, rescues a tune
from ‘lightness'

(Coltrane would take this on)
half-a-century old
like me
the 1950s
a now unimaginable world
of bright lights, electricity
coloured drinks
"we don't need alcohol
we just like it".

Whatever you say, Frank.

Are Pam and Jane
wandering Rome
or escaped to a cool villa elsewhere?
Is Pam writing

a view across Trastevere to the Tiber

positioned at a desk in the apartment
as Ken
sets up in the Baci with coffee, cake,
The Guardian,
me
on my back on the sofa
my preferred writing method

. . . from which I watch aircraft
descend over Hamilton,

my friends in their various places
in the fading twilight

like a line from The Star Spangled Banner
a couch
Kerouac was too patriotic to sit on.

*

I cook dinner to
Danny Gatton, 88
Elmira Street,
the moon, yellow
gibbous
over Morningside,
thinking 50s hits
a teenager imagining
being there
(on the moon)
away
from all this
the cream-puff face
of George Méliès satellite
(Satellite of love?)

Danny G an heir to this philosophy
(he
hanged himself in the garage,

though his music now
seems benign enough

especially the theme to The Simpsons
or, heartbreak, a version of
‘In my room'.

*

A day later:
I'm sitting on the floor
(not lying down)
at the Judith Wright Centre
- the poetry
and Frank Sinatra
continue -
Jill Jones
not liking the heat,
Michael Farrell
(‘the man wears shorts')
reading in tandem with Martin Harrison

"Re-
New the Word"
says the poster.

Sitting, I view
legs of the poets
("Gimme da word . . ."
said a cartoon in Pam's early book;
the frightened reply
"I . . . I've forgotten it.")
When Michael reads
a guy with beard and sandals
walks out.

*

Home,
post-reading

the hottest it's been in this room
a moon
like the one that hangs over
fields of Shoreham
Samuel Palmer's harvest
except here
suburb, not ripened corn
or both?
(suburb and corn)
that would be Brisbane
the "blessed city"
as Gwen Harwood had it
in wartime
and me
an age
of consumption
a river-side
of plasma screens.
Who needs the moon?

*

Coffee at Jamie's Espresso
a minimalist model plane above the refrigerator

wire body
pathetic wooden wing
propeller spun by the fan

(what was the line from EM Forster
highlighted METAPHOR
by some scholar:

"the fan rotated like a wounded bird"

a metaphor for poetry?)

Another coffee
"Hi Bronwyn"
is that sculpture on stage
really fish fucking?

The poet takes notes.
New poetry
a veneer of theory
John Forbes
invoked by the multitudes.

Outside, the heat
"neon in daylight"
(the 24-hour grocery)
inside
FAME
I wanna live forever . . .
No Joke!

*

James Street Bistro.

Will my coffee arrive? (the waitress busy
chatting up the young ‘suits').

It does, but it's the
wrong coffee.

‘The Reverend David Sheppard . . . Freddie Trueman
. . . I'll remember that forever'

Revelation of the year:
John Howard doesn't like cricket.

"Downtown Huddersfield . . ."

I want a bistro, not an open-plan office.

*

At Vroom, figuring
what it is I like about
music played in cafés

generic ‘acid jazz'

neither ‘acid' nor ‘jazz'
but ok for coffee

(‘Ambulance Music'
invokes cool for the texters
and me
I'm part of this theatre
wet ink dries visibly

charades of western life

as, at home, on the wall

the fall of Capa's republican soldier, over
an exploding sand dune
somewhere in W.A.
by Tim Burns

(not the Tasmanian Tim Burns
the formerly Sydney one)

rain on the suburbs

drill vibration
from the building site

*

Max Planck said
"paradigm shift always happens
after the funeral"

apparently.

As I age I look
more and more like a thug

waiting
with Basil Bunting
for that fad
(fiction)
to pass.

(at the writers' festival

the mild boredom of hearing people
discuss their work
- it's what you do -
Hello Ivor!
the clouds mass
promising STORM
like the rain last night
horizontal
as I drove Rosemary to the airport

(‘airpoet'
said Richard Tipping.

Thanks Richard.


At the New Farm Deli:
Alla Zonza!

Already
it's October