brogan bunt

White plate balanced at a slight angle on two small boxes – one cardboard and the other plastic. Salome is waiting for the head of St John the Baptist. In the meantime she has eaten some burnt toast. I used to walk through the Florentine gardens. I was camped at the very edge of town. I carried bottles of wine back to my tent each night. It was Easter. The contents of the fruit bowl have dwindled to a single avocado. I threw out the flowers several days ago and then, just yesterday, the bottle of wine that had held them. I can recall the Florentine girls – their long, dark hair, their jeans and blue tops. They were rarely alone. They wandered around in groups laughing. No use following them. My fate lay here. The softness of a white plate – the rim brighter than the flat bottom. A deep milky soup scattered in the blackest galaxy. Salome slips into lassitude. John the Baptist is nowhere to be seen.

Everything seems to be drawn to the left side of the table. Boxes, bowls, cords and bits of paper hang over the edge. The music is also at the left. The wind blows in from the right, although not this evening. I slid the sliding glass door shut tonight. It was cold as I moved the tools up to the shed at dusk, particularly as I walked past the lime tree, with its strange prostrate branches. It resembles some bird crouched on the ground taking a dirt bath. The surrounding weeds have no idea of what to make of it, especially since I poisoned them and they have grim time to reflect. They can see the lime tree’s low green branches covered in fruit. They can feel the chill wind of late Autumn. Their vision is blurred. Their mouths are parched. They will never take up a space at the left side of my table. They will hear no more of my music. The ground loosens its hold on their roots. I do my best to not take sides.

I am listening to Johnny Cash – “In the sky, Lord, in the sky”. Brief distant view of mountains and glaciers. Seals sleeping on the pebble beach. Shards of ice on the softly lapping shore. Penguins porpoise through the shallows. There are grey and guano-red icebergs at the entrance to the harbour. What am I doing here? Was I ever here? If I look up I can see an orb of sculpted glass, triangularly tesselated with only the smallest glimmer of reflected light. It hangs low in the chandelier – just above the clock and against the rear blue wall. It can scarcely be equated to a piece of ice and is not at all like the sun. It reflects and casts only minimal light. It takes me neither to the Antarctic nor to the perils of suburban existence. it is simply a piece of glass. But there is nothing simple about this. I can hear Johnny still singing, this time of a cowpoke chasing the “Devil’s herd” – “Ghost Riders in the Sky”.

A five dollar note curved in the shape of a boomerang stands on its side, supported at the rear by a portable hard drive and at the front by a folded piece of A4 paper. The note is purple. It displays the Queen’s head, which looks in my direction, but past me, as though there are more important things to consider than myself. The Queen appears very serious and composed. Visible beside her is the suspended branch of a gum tree. The branch is not altogether coherent because the lower left corner of the note is folded and confused, leaving a mixture of jumbled leaves and subtle engraving lines. What can the Queen be looking at so resolutely, especially with one or more branches around her and the sky a tissue of dark incisions? A breeze blows in at the kitchen door. The note flutters, vibrates and falls down. The Queen succumbs unperturbed to her fate – supplanted by a geometrical pattern.

My old motorcycle helmet has shifted toward me this morning. Moved, as I recall, to create space for a plate. I wonder why I leave the helmet here. It should properly be discarded. I also wonder about the tiny yellow specks at the far end of the table. They are like inexplicable geological phenomena. I imagine that they have descended from the heavens – a granular dust. The cause is less mysterious. They are the residue of a meal. Crumbs of bread and flattened bits of salad leaves. Precisely because they are so small, they too cannot properly remain here. I will wipe them away. The table is a surface, a thin layer of wood suspended some few feet above the floor. It must retain its integrity as surface – as a smooth, flat context for other things to collect. Only objects of adequate scale may subsist here, not miniscule stuff that confuses the relationship between surface and discrete, identifiable conditions of being.

Last weekend I bought an expensive pair of pruning shears. They have aluminium handles that feel good to hold. I used them to prune the hydrangeas. Innumerable stalks, each needing to be cut back to the lowest green bud. My neighbour suggested that I cut lower, but it seemed sensible to adhere to the horticultural rule. The pruning shears are on the table like all manner of other things. The long black beak is clamped shut by a small black safety catch. The blades open and shut on an orange axle. An accordion style strip of wound metal acts as a spring to provide an appealing sense of resistance when the handles are squeezed. I cannot resist picking up the shears and releasing the catch. I squeeze the handles a number of times and observe how the blades overlap. Then I lock the shears and place them on a red book covered in white names. The handles jut out over some envelopes. The metal is smooth, but brushed in places.

I walked up into the suburbs and down to the sea. I followed an old route – one that I used to walk at night. It was late afternoon, pressing towards dusk. The sky was grey and overcast – it had been raining most of the day. The creeks were flowing brown and the leaves of the creek side plants were pulled in long ribbons downstream. The sea itself was calm. Surfers paddled hard but failed to catch the small waves. Eventually I arrived home. Walks necessarily come to an end, although their appeal lies in their capacity to suggest an infinitely open action. I am trying now to make sense of the grain pattern of the table. The pattern suggests water, the skin of a shaved dog, or even a sky full of crows, each flying separately away from the desolation of the day. But the crows are also the harbingers of that desolation. I am surprised how many there are. It fills my heart with wonder – endless permutations of sadness.

Even now the table is only dimly apparent. Just 7am. A cool breeze blows in at the kitchen sliding door. The sound of morning birds, distant cars and the clock – as well, of course, as my hands typing on these keys. She tells me to write about what actually happens, to not leave things out, especially embarrassing things. The grass in the backyard is growing lighter. The bananas in the fruit bowl are becoming yellow. But there are pauses and breaks. The day refuses to appear in its continuity. I have spent half an hour away from the table doing other things. I am back again determined to finish. It is 7:47am. The blue of the opposite wall is not an ocean. My wallet. The computer power cord – again, with its green light. The complexity of an envelope, with its folds, buldges and gradations. White passing to valleys of grey. I scan every detail in the hope that something will lead me astray. But the morning is inexorable. It is 7:59am. Now it is 8am.

It is night. What are the particular qualities of night? That darkness surrounds on all sides? That all light is contained within a hessian sack immersed in a cold, deep creek, amongst smooth, rounded stones. The fish swim above the stones – glittering and yet also invisible. The tall pine trees on the steep banks hold back the stars. Somebody drives off in an old truck, rattling and crunching up the hill to the main road. And then it is quiet. I stand for a while thinking about nothing much and then wade into the river in search of the sack, but cannot find it. I am wet through. The darkness penetrates my hands. My hands are gone. I try to whistle but make no sound. It is still raining. A roach roams about on the floor, quite close to my feet. It rushes and then stutters. Its antenna constantly twitching. It is just after 10pm. There are ways and means of making a place for ourselves in this world. I am resting on a single elbow.

Above the black jacket, which has returned again, is another bowl of fruit – only recently here. It contains a small bunch of bananas, two pomegranates, two small mangoes and two green avocados. One of the mangoes has a prominent white label. It is raining heavily outside. I stopped and brought in some old tools placed just outside on the kitchen step – a petrol powered drill, an electric grinder and a heavy blue vice. I also brought inside a plastic container of old photographs with a ripped lid, just in case the rain should blow under the roof and damage the images. I have not used the tools or looked at the photographs in a very long time. I have not yet eaten any of the fruit. The rain is continuing, occasionally becoming heavier, occasionally easing off. I look at the fruit, the tools and the box, waiting for something to happen, waiting for something to appear to me. I could describe the rain as incessant.

To find the means to assemble one word in front of another. I cannot hear the jets. I am on my own. The small red light on the near speaker suggests that I have left the speaker on for a whole night and another whole day. What array of words would be sufficient in these circumstances – either to advance or to retreat, either to press against me or to resist touching altogether? What word should be written? What word should be written just here? The darkened screen of my mobile phone offers no answer – not even glare. In the midst of this, I am walking through a narrow gate. The gate is rotted away and gone. It had once seemed much higher. I would guess that everything had seemed much higher back then. The long arms of oblivion beckoned toward us. I looked about confused. Where was my golden chariot and white steed? Where were the discarded garments of the daughters of the night?

The table changes in small increments, with the arrangement of items slightly different each day. Something new appears. Something else is gone. Something else is moved slightly. The clutter may seem a consistent, gathering phenomenon, but it has its ebbs and flows. Tonight, the brown bag dominates the scene – a tilted boulder perched on a thin strip of rolling black sand. The plastic bags have long gone. The hydrangeas are wilted and disconsolate. There are no distant prospects and no imagination of escape. No satisfaction can be taken in any of this. There is no consolation in detecting the hidden machinations of the mundane. My life is fading away – not yet, but soon enough. I cannot help smiling again in the midst of this obscure scene – caught up in this obscurity, finding in it a truth that truth cannot comprehend. I find myself whispering over and over, “she does not love me, she will never love me”.

I am tempted to turn all the lights off and to listen to the clock. Some screwdrivers obscured by paper. My wallet behind the screen. It seems someone called Geraldine Harrison lived here before me. She never redirected her mail. I am keeping her letters for the time being, but shall eventually throw them away. The beer bottle is already gone. The clock is ticking exceptionally loudly. Why have I never noticed it before? Crickets in the garden. The shrill sound of oxygen in my ears. This table is exhausting me. I can only intermittently discover other places within it. I have lost all hope of doing this easily. Nothing will come of these efforts, like the effluvia of molluscs washed up on foreign beaches, twitching in the sand, roughly pecked at by birds, turning black and blue, shiny, swollen and stinky beneath the sun. These in turn resemble nothing more than the veiny edges of my eyes once the pupils have been forcibly removed.

I drink this cheap German lager beer, Henninger. Must be dumped from the European market. It is cheaper than any Australian beer. it comes in a green bottle, with ‘Henninger’ in red on the label. It seems to have been first produced in 1869 in Frankfurt An Main. A small silver logo just above the red text displays an “H” and a “B”, with a tall castle in-between. Some other text proclaims, “TRADITIONAL GERMAN BREWING” and “FULLY IMPORTED FROM GERMANY”. There is more information on the rear label, but reading this would mean lifting my hands from the keyboard to manually turn the bottle around. It would also demand switching on the light because the day is dying. A soft grey settles over the white clouds beyond my hedge. The bottle of beer is empty. It will soon be in the bin. I really can’t leave empty beer bottles on the table. Despite all my shortcomings, I have some lingering standards.

A Chinese fan composed of diverse items. Actually just three: the keys to my motorbike; a letterbox advert for Samsung mobile phones; and a packet of Ramset Wallmate picture hanging anchors and hangers. The body of some exemplary mobile phone user appears headless, handless and legless at the lower edge of the sun faded advert. The cable of my Mac runs in a broad arc from the side of my laptop across the wrists of this illusory person to the edge of the table and then downwards to the floor. This last bit is out of sight, although I can see the cable continuing well beyond that point to a jumbled power outlet beneath a small side table that holds my stereo system and few knicknacks, notably a brass buddha and a toy rhinoceros made of wood and wire. The person in the advert is wearing a striped beige and white, semi-button down tee shirt with broad white lapels. How can this possibly suggest the present or the future? What is being sold to me?

The time is past when I can say anything reasonable or furnish the outer rooms of my abandoned home. I have done my best. I have looked in various directions. I have raised my head above the table, the ceiling and the roof. I am on my way, with the night in pursuit. It hastens towards me, whispering words of encouragement. Yet the table remains obstinately still and silent, despite the lamentations and obscenities rising from the burning villages, despite the unsettling voyage to new lands. So I allow the table to accompany me. And the table endures me. It joins me as a fellow traveller. I take my rest beside it. I imagine that I am resting. I look fondly at all my stuff. I have eaten more than enough. I would call for more alcohol if there were anyone around, but the darkness at the edges of the table hides no one. We are alone and shall find no solace in the shadow of these gloomy rocks.

Struggle through the late afternoon. A single apple and lime in a large wooden bowl at the far end of the table. They lie beyond the range of my immediate attention. The apple has been there too long. I will never eat it. The lime has been there even longer, but appears less affected. The bowl supports them through my neglect – as they mutely persist. I can scarcely see the lime. It is sunk in the depths of the bowl with only the top of its green pate visible. The apple protrudes more, pointing a small anus upwards. If it must confront decline then let it do so with no false modesty. The bowl itself is shaped from a large, convoluted wooded knot – thickly carved, pockmarked and dark, but with a broad stream of blond wood running up to the rim. This stream runs right up to where the exposed apple sits, like a mat of licentious hair, like a parting in the trees to reveal the muted contours of dusk.

All the white things seem to have risen up, resisting the the darkness of the sky, resisting the bright and shiny constellations. They are neither ground, nor ether, nor starry heavens. They are some other realm of mediation – a floating realm. Books too, like solitary ice bergs, drift from their frozen glacial harbours into the open sea. I have lost all sense of whatever the evening demands. My heart – what does my heart matter? Melinda Vernon has written to me. She is Delegate of the Electoral Commissioner for the Division of Cunningham. She informs me that I am now enrolled to vote. This letter came to me on the 18th of December 2013, some three and half months ago. Now, folded in two places, slightly bent at one corner, it asserts itself differently. I no longer read it. It is simply visible as surface, as rising surface. Foam upon the ocean waves. Foam upon a dead still ocean. I can hear the buzz of work-bound cars. I hesitate, as always.

Across the depths of the gathering night – in ebbs and flows, but ascending – it rains. I had walked in it, pelted with huge wet drops. And now I have escaped it. This table remains dry, although clearly it has a future that I cannot countenance, cannot adequately know. Gathering lightning in the now dark sky. A tiny rubber band beside an empty glass of wine. A white plate with knife and fork lying side by side, intimately – like some married couple before anything happens. But I am still listening to the rain, only the rain and the far away sound of thunder. I had not expected the rain to return. Why has it been drawn back? Will the new week repeat the last? How is one week to be distinguished from another? I am posing dumb questions. Expect no more more from me. All the objects in my world remain still. There is nothing that I can say that will adequately explain. There is nothing that I can do to understand.

Swaying in the breeze. Yes, there is a breeze. What stupid conceit led me to decorate this place? Fairy lights through the cosmos (as though the moon would be better painted another colour). Blue and white flowers grouped and swooning, except for one sprig that turns away from me to gaze upwards – defiant and mortal. Above them a lettuce of leaves, green and effulgent, shiny and textured, like the skin of a lizard held up to light. What led me to place this pretty thing here? Especially after I had removed every other living branch and piled them high as waste? It seems afternoon is a time when I can briefly imagine that I am someone whole, someone who places decorative things on the table. Now they tower over everything else that is otherwise there, that properly belongs there as clutter, as bits and pieces of stuff that fill my current life, or that lie on its margins, or that push towards a desolate interior, or that express that desolate interior entirely.

I have already decided that I cannot, that I am unable to. The end of an envelope ripped nearly in half lays on other envelopes as yet unopened. The dead fish tail of the toothpaste casts a subtle shadow over a portion of the ripped envelope, but also resembles some low curved roof of a home set in the midst of debris. The home itself, which scarcely exists, is a species of debris. Smooth, white and unnatural, it nonetheless summons the thinking of cliffs, of rocky ground, of a villa fallen into ruin. This place had once provided sunlight and shade, but now it has escaped the scale of human habitation. It has become small and stripped free of all context. No sound of donkeys or of the ocean. No birds. No breeze on a solitary afternoon. I see it only intermittently. Mainly I see the tear in the envelope and the combed pattern at the end of the tube. I can also recognise, through a triangular gap, the anonymity of the table.

Chucked across the table – across the plastic bag clouds – like the sudden coming of night. The black jacket is the ether that mediates beneath the earth and the heavens. Twisted and labyrinthine, with soft curves and folds. I sit quietly near it – no music tonight – remembering the dusk light outside, the grey water, the glittering cargo ships, the retreating light of the coast. I was following the headlands as they dropped toward the horizon. But now it is the jacket that looms above everything, above my memories, above a day spent doing very little (lying limply on my bed). It seems to suggest that the universe is here regardless. It descends down to the level of my table. It is just above my fingers typing on these keys, as I search for words to escape the terrors of thought. While I have no wish to contemplate the future, there is no time like the present to discover the unravelling of dreams.

I had almost lost these black gloves. I didn’t notice one evening when they fell out of my top box on to the front lawn. But they were there the next day when I left for work. Nobody had taken them. Early morning passerby must have seen the bike and recognised that the gloves were accidentally dropped. I brought them back inside. Now one of the pair is visible on the table – palm up with the thumb vacant and neatly folded over. Supplicant glove with nothing desired. Beside it, at the same visual level, the containing upper portion of a glass of red wine. The wine is only really red at the circular upper rim. The rest is dark in the same manner as the glove. They share something else ill-determined – less proximity than the contours of a null event. I have not yet reached out to the glass of wine. I have not disturbed the scene. The music has just ended. I am no longer here. There are avalanches in the distance.

Tonight I am scouring for details but cannot see them. Rain has fallen all week. There are low clouds above the table – plastic bags, white and grey. The opposite chair is empty, but slightly back from the table. Just enough room for a thin, ghostly companion. Very serious it seems. What could the ghost possibly have to say to me? Empty wooden fruit bowl. The sense of yellow light. The music of Gaziantep. What was it that you said? Sorry, don’t let me interrupt you. I am talking to myself. Speaking softly. Just small talk really. The tumult of the clouds – open organs, but containing nothing, floating lightly on the detritus of numerous weeks. Better let this stuff collect than to imagine some kind of pure state, some simple table in which there is nothing but surface. Were this desert to actually exist then what would the ghost and I possibly have to say to one another? I am sleeping in the arms of forgotten lovers.

Miners emerging from a deep cave, lamps twinkling within the inky glass. My sunglasses looking upwards from the table to the chandelier where the miner’s lights actually come from. I should have noticed the lack of swaying, the stillness of the smoothly contoured and unblemished glass. What is perhaps more apparent – more engrossing – is the static struggle between the sunglasses and a small and emaciated tube of toothpaste. The head of the tube clamped in the folded arms of the glasses, like the gasping maw of some fishy prey that has given up in the jaws of a quick and wary crocodile. Sad to still detect beauty in the curve of the empty tube.  These two objects locked in irrelevant association. I find myself thinking of the rich morass of life on earth, the inevitable destruction of all living things and the endless decay of the inanimate. There is no music tonight. I am avoiding all directions.