I read to him most nights. His freckled abandonment to life now absorbed in other worlds, eyes searching out that uniquely human distance, seeing and witnessing. Hiding behind his hands to peep out at the unseen when it threatens our adventurers. Three stories, sometimes five, sometimes only one if Rabbit…
For Nat, turning 2. I. It seems to me that, given the course of things, years will come when words will be no obstacle but catching each others’ meaning more than ever will elude. That’s my intuition anyway and I believe it has some claim to a foundation in…
I have a leather satchel that’s getting a little worse for wear. It’s sitting here on the bench beside me. It goes with me. I wear jeans most days, and most of the pairs of jeans I have outlasted in these past years have perished because the fabric…
I remember the grainy start of a day, the light rotating on the clouds from the bottom-lit night orange to the dirty pink tops and faces, arranged behind the city silhouette somewhere near the origin of Parramatta road: the most primeval of Australian ways, the first of our journeys. Leaving…
The plastic box contains a disjointed collection of fishing tackle: the aggregate of summer holidays, a tangle of failed temptations. Take out the plastic hand-lines and stack to one side. The cork hand-line is more interesting. It can sit on its own. A small box full of lead. Hefty. Dense.…