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‘This is the city. Melbourne, Victoria. It’s a big one. Second-largest city in Australia; it’s still growing. It’s a big animal with a big appetite. Five million people. There are five million stories in this naked city. The stories you’re about to hear are true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.
‘Hell, nobody’s innocent.
‘There’s a bilious melancholy, a choleric sorrow to Melbourne behind the magic mystery of the real. That’s the Spleen of Melbourne. It’s Paris-on-the-Yarra, a place of love and crime. And beneath its Parisian underbelly, the lonely experience of fugitive, abortive romance feels like the obscure workings of some organized crime.
‘And that’s my business. I live here. I’m a flâneur.’
“The Spleen of Melbourne: Prose Poetry & Fiction”. A new CD audiobook available from deankyte.com.
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2. |
Enigma of the afternoon
06:13
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There is a corner of Little Bourke street between Thomson and Little William streets, opposite the Supreme Court, where, in certain empty hours of certain vacant afternoons, an absent population gives voice to the unattended square. The flâneur, pausing in the shadow of the Supreme Court, overhanging the narrow ledge of sidewalk, feels his feet diverted by the mysterious magnetism of the hour and the place, twittering to itself.
The occidental rays, from Footscray, send a slanting finger through the narrow file, reaching towards Chinatown, gilding to acacia the verdant leaves of the plane trees which curtain the square. The flâneur, whose hesitating feet stumble on the eerie ambiance of hour and place, stops altogether, loitering without intent yet feeling strangely criminal as he lingers in the brown umbral of the Supreme Court.
The reverberant murmur of the twittering square seems to rebound against its façade with unnatural loudness. Eyes search the source of this pullulating cheep in the unoccupied square, looking to the boxy eaves of the second storey overhanging the closed cafés and siestaring restaurants. The sparrowsong seems too ‘canned’ to be actually emanating from the still and empty square. Eyes search, but neither kind of speaker—no artificial amplifier secretly broadcasting the aria into the circumambient air, nor the shrill singers in their choralling quarrel—reveal their telltale presence.
The square remains stubbornly vacant, its mystery inviolate.
The cunning flâneur, hoping to surprise the source of the enigma in flagrante, may attempt to sneak up on it on odd days, at different hours of the afternoon—but always in vain. The twittering voices of the murmuring square are, alas! invisible.
The feet are lured across the street, into the eerie square, in order to see better, to hear better where the obscure voices are hiding. The unnatural loudness of the unseen source makes this paradoxical choir seem somehow distant, uncannily close as it feels, as though far away in time rather than in space. Like a tapeloop recorded on the waxy slate of the square, the phantasmal registrations of the sparrows’ absent presence seem to cycle eternally.
The flâneur rests himself momentarily on one of the sculptural benches in the centre of the square and scans eaves, trees and street: No sign of life. Pricked ears seek a pattern which would betray the hand of an artificial arranger of this birdsong, but no trace of orchestration is detectable in the pleasant chaos.
Uncurious pedestrians pass occasionally; cars more occasionally still. Silence, pregnant with texture, accoustically fills the empty vessel of the square as neatly as if it were a cube. You seem to be the only source of conscious life in the quietly murmuring square carrying on its interior monologue. Perhaps this überreal conversation, apparently unremarqued by others, unheard by other ears, takes place within yourself.
You look to greygold sky overhead, birdless. The friendly menace of the square settles itself more comfortably about you, turning over in its siesta, undisturbed by the catlike vigilance of the flâneur, familiar spirit of the place. The unconscious burble of its mystery resumes more confidently, dreaming the flâneur’s invisible presence just as he imagines the invisible birds.
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3. |
In a lonely street
03:42
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He idled in the twilit street, relaxed yet alert, as a man whose trade has taught him the vigilant patience of endless waiting idles.
All had fallen away from him: the allies of convenience he had cultivated in his trade; the machiavellian avidity with which he had once regarded politics; the hatred of the cops. Even smiling women bored him now: he had encountered all their infinite mendacities and deceptions, such that not one could impress him as being an original article.
Jail had not tempered him. Instead, the ascetic monasticism of prison had served to further dessicate the hermetic aridity of his soul. It was both boundless desert and a garden closed up which irrigated itself from a hidden source.
Stripped of everything,– even his trade,– the hard wood of his character had taken the inescapable impress of it: he was a detective. The sole pleasure which remained that soul divested of everything was the instinct of the wanderer, the loiterer, the professional surveillant who inhabited, catlike, the uncomfortable exteriority of the street like its familiar spirit, as though it were a cosy interior. This outward severity of aspect, the implacability of banality, the emptiness of public places transiently populated as vectors between private scenes now fell about his shoulders as closely as one of his own tailored suits and seemed the outward uniform of his interior landscape, deracinated of all but the most impersonal qualities.
The void of places transiently populated, the inscrutability of their faces, the vacuous, unconscious burble of their ebb and flow, the mystery of unmysterious reality now became his riddle and his koan where once the occult motives of clients, the lies of pretty women, the depradations of power, the corruption of the cops, the lusts of money and the commerce of sex had been the subjects of his inquiries and the objects of his investigations, plots thrown, like a banal and tawdry curtain, over this void, the inscrutable theatre of empty spaces unobserved, of time unlistened to.
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4. |
William street, night
03:47
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The mellow light des lampadaires filtered through the floconfeuilles des platanes verses itself, sievelike, over William street, each silver sliver falling softly, invisibly, into the void of darkness de la rue.
You linger at the corner of Little Collins street, a restive presence, camera primed. A taxicab, its crown ablaze, idles opposite, another nightcat catercorner to you, another ruecruiser, phares fiercely aglim, soliciting for a fare. A dark car, a sedan sleekly glistening like oil, stands still and dark, muffledup with the lightmottled night, a gangster’s ride. Among the greyhued shadows within, no motion, no manshaped trou punched through the spectrum of noirness.
At William street, the eerie air which pervades Little Collins street at night finds an estuary of other eerie street energy. The two meet and commingle at this crossing. The energy of each street being particular, their particulate particles combine in an odd atmosphere even more indefinable when conjoined. You hold vigil, camera at the ready, hopeful that the spectral aura can be registered on the filamented grain of film.
Two broads, shortskirted, loud gueules with broad gestures, disturb the ambiance as they wander up Little Collins street. They emerge into this estuary of confluent energies, oblivious, mobiles en main as they search for some bar. They mill on the corner across from you, conscious of the unconscious exhibition of themselves, pale scimitar limbs and mascarastreaked eyes madeup for Saturday night on Sunday.
They turn north, towards Bourke street. Right then, le moment décisif approaches: the 58 tram, Toorakbound, scrapes and squeals across Bourke street and trundles into your frame. The girls, realizing their error, turn back towards you: the bar, in Bank place, lies east, not north. You depress the shutter release button, which utters that satisfying snack: taxi/tram/lamps/trees/leaves/sedan/shadowed dames retained by the instant reflex of the mirror—the eerie atmosphere of William street at night.
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5. |
The criminal’s friend
05:15
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The velvet evening ungathered itself, descending on the city like a slow curtain closing on the final act of the day, a play in which nothing happens. Now the darkening scene was set for its true drama. Neon dawned on the cutout scape of skyscrapers, giving body to their silhouettes. Behind the flats, the spun glass of pinkish clouds cycled slowly through their clockwork constellations.
He had been away, in Brisbane, for much of the month, and was surprised to find that it was still comparatively mild in Melbourne for late June. He had his overcoat unbuttoned and his scarf draped behind his neck. A breeze, almost balmy for that time of year, set its teeth in him gently, like a playful puppy.
He loitered, smoking in the gloom, behind the timedulled bust of the Ercole Farnese, and watched the black back of St Kilda road beetle with the antlike pedestrians. The breeze bore him snatches of their voices along with the whistling screel and clanging clamour of the trams; but behind the wall of trees which defended the perimeter of the garden, these sounds reached him distantly, as though broadcast from another room.
He lingered beside the sorrowful hero, casting his bleary sight upon the nightdraped city, he who had more in common with that master craftsman of crime, the muchenduring Odysseus, the man of many twists and turns, than with the strong man. But something in the sculpture’s sorrowful strength propped up his own flagging spirits, his own weary, melancholy soul as he rested against its cool plinth. Perhaps he turned to Hercules out of some memory which was then unconscious to him: He had known the Hercule Farnèse in the Tuileries well and had sought out his silent, contemplative comradeship often as now, in the Queen Victoria Gardens, he repeated that gesture without even being aware of it.
He smoked impatiently, distractedly as he waited—for what or for whom he knew not. The vigil was all. Like a cat, it was his business to wait and to be ready for the unenvisageable eventuality. He gazed in the direction of Swanston street, the only indication of which was the mutter of restless movement issuing, invisibly, from Flinders Street Station.
He could not bear to go back to Young and Jackson, he decided, and it would be a very long time before he did so. Ought he to get on the 1 or the 6 and go to Lygon street for dinner? More memories would attend him there.
He was beyond the point where repetitions of old rotations could bring him even a melancholy pleasure. Now the memories which fond places evoked were bitter, and a seal was set over many of them, so that he must walk onward, toward the untrammelled frame which receded before him of a world with less and less new streets left to prowl.
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6. |
The Skipping Girl
01:34
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Every city has its icon of light beaming benediction upon the friendless night. Melbourne has the Skipping Girl.
She’s as Melbourne as trams, and the first time I encountered her, I was alighting from the 109 with a girl I had only just met. We were about to go upstairs to her place and make love. As I stood at her window, waiting as she showered, watching the joyous upbeat as my heart skipped anxiously, I knew I would always associate the Skipping Girl with her.
The wine of love we would taste together in those hours would turn to vinegar in my memory.
I would always associate the Skipping Girl with a Dutch girl who had played Double Dutch with me, skipping lightly over my heart.
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7. |
Uniacke court
04:00
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It was 6:00 p.m., hour when the bars and restos begin their trade in earnest, and a grey, rainy veil moved before him in the wind. He wore the moist grey evening as comfortably as his duncoloured trenchcoat. The rubber soles of his brogues paused in their flânerie opposite Uniacke court, arrested by the emanation of its fascinating aura.
Some vibration, almost inaudible beneath the slough and slur of cars which passed him in Little Bourke street, drew his attention to the alleyway, coming to lurid life with the greasy transience of the restaurant trade, debouching its odorous kitchen doors onto the court.
Three lamps—purple, blue and red—sleazily leaked their light, dripping down the slick, graffito’d wall of rainwet paint, spraying grape upon, blurring, rouging with their lurid, vicious, viscous tints the already diabolical cast of the Joker’s laughing visage defacing the wall. These neon comets traced their nasty paths to pool over the narrow, oily ledge of sidewalk, puddling in the gutter, bruising and burnishing the asphalt with their mottled hues.
Above these lights, three others, yellowwhite, stretching from the rear of the court and spaced at intervals along the western wall, beckoned him like a crooked finger. The light in the deepest depths of the court burned permanently, but the two nearer him came on, one at a time, flaring briefly, and then, just as abruptly, extinguishing themselves in a tattoo. He heard rather than saw the ominous sirencall of this pattern repeating itself at fewsecond intervals.
This spectacle did not transfix him; something beneath and in back of it seemed to call him forward, into the gallery of the laneway, draped in teeming shadows which regarded him familiarly. He could see the provocative cartoon of the spraypainted redhead, receiver held to her ear, deeply décolletée, at the end of the court. An arc of shadow fell across her glinting, catlike eyes like a widow’s veil, giving her a plotting, conspiratorial air as she listened intently to the silent intelligence vibrating at the other end of the wire.
The ineffable tug of that mysterious energy emanating from the court lightly grasped lapel and sleeve, and one foot, followed by the other, was summoned off the low sidewalk.
In a very few steps he had forded Little Bourke street and stood at the penumbrous edge of the mystery.
He knew, with the muffled heartbreak of professional instinct, what he would find in the dark car nestled at her breast.
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8. |
Chinatown(s)
01:33
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In whatever city Chinatown is located, these Chinese embassies are zones of mystery and ambiguity.
And the tragedy for the flâneur is that these places we know so well know us so little. We are erased from the faces of places as soon as we depart them. We are as unpermanent a mark upon the memory of their streets as a lover’s caress is upon our skin.
And for the flâneur, the Daygamer left over in the labyrinth, whose streets are the dædal of his days, to re-encounter the coin de rue where he passed a moment of amour with some passante and to encounter no trace of her, nor of himself, evokes a sensation not of ‘déjà vu’, but of jamais vu—jamais vécu.
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9. |
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What esprit de flânerie had drawn him here he could not say. But the image of it,—the rusted tracks, their ties overtaken by the marauding verdure; the red, unrolling rollingstock blocking tracks which vanished in the horizon of ruinous green,—seemed an apt metaphor for his life with women.
As afternoon segued to evening with the savageness of a cut, he saw himself as an empty, twilit platform where no woman would again alight, the unchalerous shell of a darkened station which would no more warmly receive the transitory train of her ambassade through the embassy set over the foreign country of his interior life. A lamp which illuminated nothing; a sign which apprised no one of nowhere; a bench conveniently placed, and upon whose convenience no one rested and refreshed themselves:—Sometimes places, in their abstraction, resemble us more closely than do other people.
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10. |
The Touch
01:26
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As we huddled, cuddling under my raincoat, in the Treasury Gardens, and kissing in the quickening winter’s dusk, I had a dim sense of the con being worked upon me—the futility of victory with a woman I had already conquered.
It doesn’t matter if you have already slept with them these days:—For no matter how much she is attracted to you, or how much she genuinely likes you at any given moment, each time you encounter her, you must reconquer her as if you had never conquered her before, like Sisyphus re-rolling the rock.
In the Treasury Gardens, I had a palpable sense of the unreality of her reality beneath my touch, like clutching an armful of clouds. As much as I didn’t want the moment to be over, I wanted it to be over quickly, for I sensed that she was not really there.
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11. |
Dreidel
08:02
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The two pigeons huddled with grim determination, their heads sunk deeply upon their plumed bosoms, fluffed up like the collars of fur coats, as they sheltered in the déco niches of the O’Donnell memorial. The central panel of the sandstone monument, a defunct fountain, showed a weblike tracery of rays, like the interior of an oculus, or a section of globe unfurled and flattened so that the spokelike interstices of latitude and longitude formed quadrilateral lozenges of darkness emanating from an egyptized semicircle of sun. The girl turned away from the urnlike memorial, flanked with the fierce cherubim of griffins at its ‘handles’, and surveyed the circumambient approaches to O’Donnell Gardens once more. It was a desolate morning for the first day of summer, cold and dreary, with the threat of rain hanging persistently over the St Kilda foreshore, and the palms of the park creaked in the northwesterly wind. To her right, only Luna Park made a gelid effort at animation, the Great Scenic Railway surging and plunging like a wooden wave against the grey sky as it made its scalene circuit of the park’s perimeter.
A tall, bulky man, once physically powerful but now tending to fat, was approaching quickly along the path leading from the carpark in Shakespeare grove. The oncedark hair, closely cropped, that clung to his bullet head like a skullcap seemed now like iron filings which had magnetized around a pole. He wore jeans and Nikes and a rather greasylooking bomber jacket that was evidently not genuine leather. He took off the large sunglasses as he approached the small girl in the purplish wool sweater, black active pants and runners who was carrying the blue, clothbound book. The gold lettering on the cover, above and below her hand as it gripped the slim volume loosely to her side, bore three words: DILEMMAS and ERNEST DOWSON. She had long dark hair which fell in loose, lustrous coils that were held back from her face by a black velvet turbanstyle headband.
—Ciao, nipote! the big man hailed her as he approached.
—Ciao, zio. The girl spoke Italian with a French accent. She raised herself on tiptoes to receive and exchange the European greeting as they kissed each other on both cheeks.
—Benvenuto a Melbourne! the man said, beaming and making an expansive gesture which took in Luna Park. How are you finding the place?
—Cold! the girl exclaimed. They told me it would be summer en Australie. She nodded to the east, behind the tepid frenzy of Luna Park. Your St Kilda Beach looks like Brittany.
A gravelly chuckle issued from the big man as he resheathed his eyes.
—You’ll be right, love. In Australia we have a saying: ‘If you don’t like the weather in Melbourne, just wait a while.’
—Ah oui.
He put a hand casually on her elbow and indicated the memorial beside them with a jerk of his head.
—Let’s get away from that thing. You never know who’s lurking around. While we’re at it, parliamo Italiano.
—Va bene.
They sat down on the bench overlooking the memorial, the big man halfturned towards the small girl, his right elbow resting on the wooden seatback.
—Allora, che notizie hai da Parigi? he asked in a low, affectless tone.
The girl replied in the same low, dispassionate fashion, as if she were delivering a report.
—Tuo zio manda i suoi saluti. Il tuo regalo è stato ben accolto. Mio padre era molto soddisfatto della spedizione.
—Bene.
—Mi ha chiesto di portati qualcosa in cambio, she said, and produced a small black box with a hinged lid, like a jewel case. Opening it, she revealed a small enamel dreidel, handpainted, of blue and gold set snugly in plush royalblue velvet. The tip of the dreidel was composed of an old European cut diamond of significant size, and the tailed bracket of the letter nun, which lay uppermost, had been inset with smaller diamonds that glittered in the weak grey sunlight.
The girl took the dreidel out of its case and set it spinning on the blue cloth cover of her book, which was resting in her lap, using her forearm as a kind of rampart to keep the precious object from falling to the ground. All the Hebrew letters on its four sides were composed of diamonds, and in the few seconds that she let it spin, they chased each other in a dazzling carousel that mirrored the revolutions of pleasure cycling behind the wall of the amusement park before them. She stopped the dreidel smartly with her hand. The letter gimel lay uppermost. She handed the dreidel to the big man.
—Con i complimenti della nostra famiglia, she said.
—Grazie, nipote.
He raised his sunglasses to examine the objet de vertu carefully, turning the shimmering facets in his hand to catch the weak light overhead.
—Che magnifico! he breathed. Il Signor sarà contento con questo.
The girl handed the man the case without looking at him. He fitted the dreidel into its snug depression and snapped the case shut, slipping it into the inner breast pocket of his jacket.
—E tu? he asked. Possiamo fare qualcosa per aiutarti?
—Adesso, no. Ho accettato un lavoro ad Armadale. Lavoro in un caffè europeo nella Kings Arcade.
—Buono. Avremo un po’ di lavoro per te a breve, the big man said. He got up to go, grinning down at the small girl. Don’t call us; we’ll call you. In the meantime, enjoy Melbourne. Get yourself a boyfriend, make some amiche. Go to Luna Park. Relax and enjoy yourself.
The girl rose also.
—D’accord. She looked over at the two pigeons still huddling stolidly in the niches of the memorial and shook her head. Guardi questi poveri uccellini…
The big man halfturned to look behind him, shrugged and snorted slightly.
—They’re Melbourne birds, he said. They wouldn’t hang around here if they didn’t know how to wait awhile. He gave the small girl a quick European peck on the cheek. Ciao, nipote. Send my regards to uncle.
She nodded.
—Ciao, zio. It was nice to meet you.
The big man retraced his rapid steps along the path leading to Shakespeare grove, while the girl made her way towards Acland street.
A movement in the depths of one of the niches where one of the two pigeons was huddling disturbed it, causing it, and its companion, to hurriedly vacate their shelter, taking off with a clatter of wings.
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12. |
Office at night
06:02
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His right arm traced a descending arc as he brought the mobile phone down from his ear and inclined himself intently over the effulgent screen. In the next instant, the greenish glow reflected on his profile changed abruptly to livid orange, signalling the termination of the call.
The cool white boules of the brassbranched chandelier flowering from the ceiling above the desk splashed a gleaming comma of light on his broad pink crown as he considered this intelligence. As he thought, his profile turned an eighth of a revolution, until he was halffacing the bay window to his right, the ecliptic motion of the light overhead causing the planes of shadow to rouse and resettle themselves upon the peachcoloured hemisphere of his broad, bald skull, casting his features into deep shade. His chin sunk deeply upon the white collar of his open shirt, all but embedded in the dark V formed by the tootight, dappledgrey jacket, his taurean stockiness gave him a bullish aspect as he stood, motionless in that pose, the gleaming arc of collar under his chin completing the backlit corona which aureoled his round head.
He stood that way for fully a minute, only his deeply shadowed eyes appearing to dimly work beneath the ridge of knitted brow, highlit by an oblique lamp in the street casting a mossy, verdigriginous glow over the bay window, the whites of his eyes greyly flashing as they read the corollaries of this news sketched and schematized on the window as upon a blackboard.
Outside, the chill May dusk had descended with rapidity, and Collins street was now as dark at 6:00 p.m. as it would be at midnight. Like an altarpiece, the canted bay window surmounted with the octagonal, rubyleaded insets framed in faceted triptych the palladian, palazzesque uniformity of 271 Collins’ granite and sandstone façade trebly repeated. Regarding from their recesses the variegated vectors traced by the evening traffic—footed, wheeled, flanged—with Olympian aloofness, the saturnine granite mascarons who crowned the arched openings on the ground floor frowned on Collins street, mirroring the attitude of the bald, stocky man who stood opposite them on the first floor of Block Court.
His lowered head turned bullishly towards the dark mirror of the window, he appeared to gaze vacantly at his milky, indistinct portrait, crowded into the leftmost corner of the central bay, framed in baizeish light.
The jolly hail of two trams exchanging salutations as they passed each other in Elizabeth street seemed to bring him back to himself with a spurt of determined animation. He turned and charged around the desk towards a framed reproduction of Brack’s Collins St, 5 p.m. hanging over on the northern wall in the corner beside the door.
The crown of the gleaming hemisphere winked in the baizey pier over the arcade as he tickled an occult catch beneath the edge of the simple black frame. The picture subtly unhinged itself from the wall by an acute degree. The bald, stocky man folded back the Brack and fiddled briefly before the wallsafe set behind it. Then he closed the steelgrey door and set the dissimulating panorama which mirrored the street below the window once more over the safe.
He rapidly retraced his steps to the desk and set a thick file down on it while he reached below the velourous edge of the windowframe. With little ceremony, he shoveled laptop and file into a cheap, formless laptop bag. Then he hurriedly loaded pratt and tail pits with wallet, keys and mobile phone, hastily grabbed the laptop bag up off the desk and slung it over his right shoulder as he padded quickly to the door.
The white boules of the chandelier and the downlights recessed in the ceiling extinguished themselves, and the windows of the office fell into darkness.
A minute later, the bald, stocky man emerged into the darkened cul de sac formed by the Bendigo Bank branch on the ground floor of Block Court. He fobbed his way through the glass security doors which defended the sanctity of the ATMs in rear and passed through the déco arcade. The coffered, downlit ceiling, its vaults seemingly inlaid with nacreous, liquid light, rained an ominous, luminous penumbra about his stocky silhouette as it rapidly enlarged and emerged from the arcade, turning hurriedly left into Collins street.
In the urgency of his mission, he didn’t notice the man in brown standing beside the payphone opposite.
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13. |
Milton, when a youth
06:47
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There’s a painting in the NGV by Henry Fuseli, that Baptist to Blake’s Christ. It depicts the fabled moment when, asleep beneath a tree, John Milton was visited by the unmet muse, the shadow of a strange lady who planted some words, the seeds of Paradise Lost, in the fertile soil of his dreams. Even in his sleep, Fuseli’s Milton looks blind as a classical idol, swooning en los sueños, his prophetic, delphic vision turned deliriously within, as in his dream of reason, he justifies the ways of God to men.
I passed an idyll once, a dream with an Italianatelooking lady under a tentlike linden in the Carlton Gardens. I recall her dark hair as being coarse as a horse’s mane, and, like the ingresque odalisque of Raffaello’s Fornarina, she wore the black mess of tresses wrapped up in an exotic turban which gave her an antique, Oriental air.
The oasis of our siesta over, she asked me, afterwards, as we walked arminarm up the allée towards the tramstop in Nicholson street, what tree I would build my dreamhouse in. Passing the palais of the Royal Exhibition Building, the verdant Versailles of riotous parterres revelling before it, and the concordant Hochgurtel Fountain gurgling, murmuring to my memory of la Fontaine des Mers, in that antipodean Tuileries transfigured by a moment of sensuality perdu, I saw briefly in my vision, before I put the starry dame on the tram, Paris! – that other paradise lost. As spectral as a dream, it hung about me, present in its past, as this spectral lady hung, darkly shining, on my arm, an Eva I’d bitten into beneath the linden, but who had now passed forever from my lips.
Under the buttressed, tordred bowers of the Moreton Bay figs, I launched, with proustian loquacity, into prosodic rhapsody, describing my ‘soul tree’, the horsechestnut which had shaded and sheltered me with its ombrous umbrella au coin de l’allée de Diane et de la Voie Triomphale aux Tuileries. As we crossed the street to the tramstop, the 96 bearing down on us, East Bruswickbound, I rounded out this anecdote. She squeezed my hand, and in contrast to my raconteurial periphrasis, told me in a few brief parole, as the tram pulled up beside us, which tree in our Eden she would have built her dreamhouse in.
Non ricordo quale albero che mi disse.
No arriverderci, no aurevoirs. Like a pleasant dream fleeing more quickly the more quickly it is pursued by waking consciousness, she simply hopped up into the E-class, and the last I saw of her in this life was her fornarina portrait sliding out of the finestrino of its frame as that traum of tram bore her toward Coburg. She was sitting very rigid and straight against the green cushions of the carriage, like the somnambulistic subject of a mesmerist’s deception, her eyes shut tight as Milton’s in the painting by Fuseli, and breathing very deeply, as if she were trying to regain her disturbed 和.
She did not open her eyes, did not hazard to betray any desire to take a souvenir of me, or vouchsafe me one last look as, like a gondola dondolando dolcemente, berced by the vagaries of the rails, the traumtram carried her away.
I turned, recrossed the street, retraced my steps slowly, meandering through the Carlton Gardens, the moist memory of her lips drying on mine as I tacked back to Exhibition street by random detours through the labyrinth. Like a couplet whispered to a sleeper, that last, strange image of her, eyes shut tight as she tried to regain the harmony within herself which my dream of passion had disturbed, planted some mystic intimation of the horror and the darkness, the spleen wrapped in the ideal of sensuality, in me, a potent phrase which, awake, I could not now recall.
Like a great place emptying of people at dusk, I too emptied of the darkstarred dame, and with each step I regained my jarred and shaken 和, returning to the labyrinthine banality of my habitual solitude as a flâneur in the grand green maze of a great city in the late afternoon.
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Dean Kyte Melbourne, Australia
Dean Kyte is a writer, filmmaker and flâneur.
His CD of prose poetry and literary crime fiction, “The Spleen of Melbourne”, is available on BC.
Dean Kyte recommends:
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Classy electronica with a sense of humour. PostModern Escape Artist is one of the best-kept secrets on the web. You know what I mean? I know what you mean.
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Nicki Minaj meets Jada Fire in freestyling, rhymebusting orgasmic girlfight mindporn. A mistress of metaphor, MasterPiece massages your most erogenous zone.
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The perfect soundtrack for a long train ride at night. Lounge back against the cushions, tune into David Creese’s eerie dream plays, and zone out, rocked by the rails in a hallucinogenic experience.
go to albumIf you like Dean Kyte, you may also like:
We Must Be Sacred
by The Last Poets
featured on Bandcamp Radio Oct 23, 2018
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Playing with Esu / Where will Ogun Live
by Neo Griot & The Afrocentric Prince
featured on Bandcamp Radio Jan 25, 2022
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Fodder
by Douglas Kearney & Val Jeanty
Poet Douglas Kearney and composer/producer/drummer Val Jeanty link up for a a compelling LP that feels like the written word come to life.
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