Brushtail possum-spotting is becoming an evening past-time: they are also in the Fitzroy Gardens, though there they are more elusive than the ones in the nearby Carlton Gardens, and are far warier towards humans, alert. Easy to see why: scant evening foot traffic, dimmer park lighting, and greater seclusion of their tree nooks and dens from city roads have meant less exposure to human gawkers — their Carlton cousins, in contrast, have the nonchalance of campus squirrels, and frolick on the moonlit grass in plain view of the shutter-happy with their camera phones; most let me get as close as a metre away without seeming unduly perturbed, though had I lunged at one it would have bounded away nimbly enough and whipped up the nearest tree — fast climbers they were, racing an upward spiral path around tree trunks. That all this a 7 minute walk from our CBD apartment astonished me most: urban animals do.

Six previous trips down under and I have never seen them before — like hares on their haunches from afar, was my first thought, but with short, perked ears - half bat half cat; and bushy, curved tails, very much like that of a raccoon sans rings (not at all like the skinny, tapering rat-tail of the American opossum, which is confusingly also called a possum (the o- lexical distribution is regional in the US, I expect, and would hazard the o- is non-Southern?)  — the eyes were most surprising — round and large and unflinching (recalling Sebald and the uncanny gaze of animals in the Antwerp nocturama) but wore an expression that was shy, lightly surprised and mildly curious.

(backlogged 29 November 2017)

[This is a dream.]

I heard the email alert go ‘ping’ and groped for my phone pillowside.
And saw blearily I’d received an email from S offering me a newly-printed chapbook of his poems for $15 but he’ll take cash ‘in any currency’.
To which I indignantly retorted how about Australian dollars and I thought he was setting stories not poems and don’t I automatically get a complimentary (and signed!) copy anyway?
(And because even by irked dream logic I had a fair inkling some of the female characters might be based on me…)
Then I squinted harder and the email was actually from the poet Charles Wright saying he’d seen me quote and discuss a line from one of his poems on the Internet
And saying kindly that my English is not bad (and it’s hard when you’re new to learning a language, isn’t it)
And offering to sell me the volume of his poems in which the line quoted appeared, at $15 but cash in any equivalent currency.
The part of me not sputtering about the aspersions cast on my English (for have not US immigration officers said that to me for 15 years?) was baffled as to when exactly direct mail-order poetry had become a Thing
And I woke up thinking hey but that line was Richard Wilbur for goodness sake.

Which, as I said to S afterwards, was as sure an example of the dreaming mind incorporating recent elements into sleep pictures. Not, of course, that I’d ever taken any classes with Charles Wright when I was at UVA; though it’s easy to see how my mind made an associative leap (Wilbur + Wright.) And I had in fact been talking to S about assorted typefaces and page-making software before going to bed, agreeing it was hard getting to grips with unfamiliar software for the first time.

Even I was astonished later, however, when I looked up the Richard Wilbur poem in full (‘…doubtless it is dangerous to love / This somersault of seasons; / But I am weary of / The winter way of loving things for reasons.’) Clearly I had completely put it out of my conscious memory, but there was the typesetting connection in fact: The word ‘serifs’ appears in it. (He was talking about ice on trees in winter, ‘laden serifs’ on ‘a script of trees’.)

*Also wishing I remember what Tony Spearing says about dream visions; all I can unfortunately remember is James Simpson on cheese dreams not being prophetic dreams.

pink dot, 9th edition (next year is the biggie!) with the usual suspects.

hong lim park, 1 july 2017