Port Fairy Folk Festival
Like praying mantises, the stilt walkers glide along
Port Fairy’s streets, carnival meadows adrift with balloons.
A statue busks for animation and, later, we sit with him
on the Post Office steps where he washes off his face paint
with a towel. A British actor, with a back complaint,
I can’t bend anymore, he says; and we sympathise
with his damp grass bones, having listened all day
to the Tent 3 bands: The Mojos from New Orleans;
the Habibis, Zydego Jump and from New Zealand:
When the Cat's Been Spayed.
At night, from the football oval where campers
pitch their Macpac igloos beneath the pale March moon,
we hear drinking songs wrecked on a reef of guitars,
the slurred thirst of music's love-loneliest voices.
By day, we stroll past stalls selling plastic beads
and AFL-themed Harlequins, face-painters brushing
children's eyes with colour, as though fun is façade
and glitter maternal. A small violinist plays Twinkle
her cap at her feet. Here, music rises
to be day's first memory and its last. Here sleep is cloud-free,
dreamless, the near earth cold. Soon the locals, relieved,
will tear down the posters and reclaim the glass-free zone.
It's Sunday with Eric Bibb. Only one more day to go.
Wristband non-transferable, invalid if tampered with
or broken, on my way to the gospel gig, I watch
the bible buskers Trucking for Jesus on Sackville Street
Francis Bacon
The melting pope is a postcard favourite,
cherubic angels forgotten in the hustle
of Soho's unconscious dreaming.
To enter a painting you might need
to understand how the artist destroys
each canvas, destroys the past, and begins
again to tidy a workspace. Once, I heard
a priest say, perhaps in a dream,
It's useless to nail oneself to the wall.
I'm not a self portrait.
I see, now,
how he nuzzled his bruise of Latin colour
and stroked the small purgatory itching
behind his art's framed scapulae.
In the gallery, now, a woman walks by
and I notice her headache's neon lapidary
as if an MRI has been conjured from her mind
by implication. Later, in the dark
before sleep, you touch my face, tracing
its contours with one finger, as if
to reassure me that I am not melting.
Haunting the serenade
i.m. Amanda Wilson
Before the funeral we visit Rick Amor's show
at the Langwarrin Gallery. The day scowls
through rolling storms: one for silent thought.
A kind of void rises from the paintings
as though an invisible Ozymandias
broods, yet, over desolate beaches and abandoned cars.
Skinny trees haunt the carpark and a sketched
charcoal breeze digs down beneath our collars.
I'm glad of my friend Alex's presence
the quiet polish of his voice and his silences
as