Frozen dandelion
Fallen willow trees at Narracan
Autumn Twilight, Dwelling Among Mountains
In empty mountains after the new rains,
it’s late. Sky-ch’i has brought autumn –
bright moon incandescent in the pines,
crystalline stream slipping across rocks.
Bamboo rustles: homeward washerwomen.
Lotuses waver: a boat gone downstream.
Spring blossoms wither away by design,
but a distant recluse can stay on and on.
— Wang Wei, translated by David Hinton.
Uralla Nature Reserve
Black and white backyard
Falls Creek
Professor
W.H. Auden’s definition of a professor was a person “who talks in other people’s sleep.”
Orthodoxy
The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Trafalgar
The mornings begin at about five degrees.
For the first time in almost a year, Wilson isn’t sleeping in the room with me. I hear him next door when he wakes, shaking off the frowst of sleep and heading to my door.
Some mornings when I take him outside there is fog trapped in the valley, so thick that I can’t make out the mountains. Other mornings the sunrise catches metal chimneys and neighbouring windows: gilt, brilliant.
Each morning gets colder.
Sappho poem of jealousy
O, it is godlike to sit selfpossessed
when her chin rises and she turns to smile;
but my tongue thickens, my ears ring,
what I see is hazy.
I tremble. Walls sink in night, voices
unmeaning as wind. She only
a clear note, dazzle of light, fills
furlongs and hours
so that my limbs stir without will, lame,
I a ghost, powerless,
treading air, drowning, sucked
back into dark
unless, rafted on light or music,
drawn into her radiance, I dissolve
when her chin rises and she turns to smile.
O, it is godlike!
— Version by Basil Bunting (1927)