Melbourne Writers Festival 2009 diary: words like triangles

Settle on chocolate-coated fruit and nuts. There is some guilt. I should have gotten fruit. But fruit wouldn’t last as long. These can be savoured. I get a coffee. I eat my book for a little while.

and fall down at night like dead birds
and lie a few days and spoil.

Christos Tsiolkas reads a poem called Greed by Nina Cassian and I know her hunger and his relation to her fearless hunger but I am still growing the fearless part. My eyes become full of Anne Michaels’ hair and Andrea Goldsmith’s bright outfit, she exceeds the blocky theatre, and her hands shiver as she reads Dorothy Porter’s The Ninth Hour. And all the bodies in the audience know.

And always the wind blows, and again and again

Sometimes you breathe in and the poem comes with you. Other times, your mind is caught on some other ghost of a word which flies and perches behind a block on the roof and refuses to come back down and you realise you have lost the gist (Emily Ballou reads Emily Dickinson’s Hope is the Thing With Feathers). You always feel bad for not absorbing it all. Often it is not the speaker or the poem but the lack of a jigsaw piece that seems to slot (at least roughly) into your own.

You make eye contact with Nathan Curnow later at the Wordplay poetry reading and you have to look away because he has all kinds of jigsaws you think you can see the pictures of. But it’s embarrassing to be presumptuous.

At work on Tuesday a severe storm warning and your heart races to the tune of doom and the apocalypse and missed relatives on far flung corners of the globe. And thinking about the people they are severing ties with. And the extreme change from black sky to blue for the faraway folk while you just grasp at a thousand twigs hanging on larger trees, holding on to all of them at once and suddenly your feet have left the ground and you’re swaying around in the wind and so dizzy.

we hear and speak many words

She comes to my work and we have the same lunch and she tries to get me to talk about my inadequacies. But the truth is in fiction.

and feel [the] pleasure and weariness of our limbs.

And she gives me the warmest hug goodbye and I am surprised because I always thought she didn’t like hugs but I think they’re the best and I would stretch my arms right around the globe. I am too startled by the hug to hug properly back and I think I even blush because I admire her and I make a note to myself to hug better goodbye next time.

And streets run through the grass, and places