Tim Wright


The rs

what we see is what we take a lake to be
something you can drive across, something you can camp on
a surface over which eddies of wind shift around
producing as they do so all the different kinds of r sounds there are –
the italian kind, the french – this is where they all end up
or derive from, so it is said, there’s a sound recordist here capturing some
for a feature on radio national, along with herds of deer running in groups; elsewhere
art deco flats assume the sun, and somewhere below this
an opalescent glass of tea, against which rests the hand of the filmmaker, who turns
to take in bondi beach, irritated he cannot observe the ‘sweep’ of it from where he
is seated – still, the sun sizzles along, the glass
of tea continues to transmit heat to the hand resting against it, a
mere three millimetres between steaming tisane and fingerprint – why would anyone
live anywhere else he generously thinks, but this reminds him
of that unfortunate melbourne business, all in the past! he scuttles
the thought, replacing it with a comfortable theme about there being no work
for real artists in this
deadshit town – edit (as if someone might’ve heard) no wait, i love it! –
then appearing to twitch, more than slightly, his chin, as three
chinchillas pass, followed by a doberman, a dane, a borzoi and a daschund, all placidly tethered and the sight is that amusing he emits a plosive phoneme which
barely ripples the other footpath-table extras, excusing
himself suddenly (sunglasses
!) and standing, asseses the distance between the wave’s precipitation
and his own body, so comparatively clothed, the excuses
practically dribbling from him, or is that perspiration? how many days
without a shave is acceptable in the city as compared with the desert? he is mentally auditioning
an establishing shot: sunset,
timelapse, black red earth, focus pulled to reveal
barbed wire foreground – cliché but worse things happen –
checks, negotiates the street, no one stares – maybe film really is
dead, and this decade belongs to the sound artists - to the musicians? the thought
is not a pleasant one; on the foreshore a camera crew
are shooting a film clip, it is for the Rockmelons’ “L.O.V.E. (that
word)”, it is the 1990s; he walks
alongside wistfully, for a while.



Paragraph

Their mentors, the anarchist library hole-in-the-wall. I now appears more furtive. It has become clear, a Saturday obtains. The drift of shipping containers, dials, taxis, bread. The threat level is meted out. Which colour from here? Columns of sun and gas. This didn’t prevent them. The drift of bricks, from building sites, the ebb, rubbled, unanswerable. Pushed out laughs, a magpie tests a few notes. Abandon oneself to supply. From there we could see the lay of the suburbs, a crucifix secured above the door. The extras pretended to do things. And found they liked it. A new hobby emerges, ‘I have nothing to laugh against’. Land and land and as dusk falls the taverns sink infinitesimally deeper into the earth. Where the changes became permanent. Prisons rest athwart, as the scene rushes past, is towed into position. The antecedent’s determined, and we proceed. I wake up my sons, one by one. The falling fragments of life.

Tim Wright has published two books and a handful of chaps. His essay ‘Migrating Ears’, on Kris Hemensley’s magazines, was published earlier this year by the Poetry Collection of the Uni at Buffalo library.
 
 
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