Sydneysider Tim Wright and a local moggie

Today I was happily surprised to read a reflective piece on aspects of Sydney written in response to the poem 'Saxe Blue Sky' from my new book True Thoughts. It's by Tim Wright, poet and co-editor (with Nick Keys) of When Pressed. You can read it on swim/swam.

Here is the poem :

                      Saxe blue sky
                                  (thursday morning)


the millennium train
             whips past
                  the tollway to the Harbour Bridge
CHANGE GIVEN  CHANGE GIVEN  AUTO COINS ONLY
                             in bright orange
        against a saxe blue sky.
the gigantic matchsticks sculpture,
            one burnt, one phosphorus red and ready,
  jutting up 
               from a closely trimmed mound of couch.
a bronze frieze in capital letters,  on the corner
                        of the NSW Art Gallery  –
       CHRISTOPHER WREN, (old cosmopolitan), 
      (Thomas) GAINSBOROUGH -
                                    flashes by, 
    seventeenth and eighteenth century ghosts,
                     glimpsed like brief suggestions, or notes,
as I enter the drab tunnel
                                  towards Martin Place
on my way
               to advance automation,
                      to sort a set of bookbinding cards
(discard,   edit,   or   keep,
          according,   of course,
                                       to a method)              
  cards detailed with 
                     pencilled handwriting,
      traces of colleagues
                                       now moved on.  
        I remember most of them,
more,       I remember their memos, 
circulated notes -
                 our names listed,
          stapled to a corner,
                        memo read,  name ticked,      then passed along
                             to the next name -
         pre-email, 
                   and computers then exclusive to data,
            the binding card
                              mimicking book spines,
                a card index 
                                the instrument of record.

the train squeals into Redfern,
                    I emerge from the dim light
    deep under the city 
             to see the saxe blue sky
                               look smoggier,
              pale grey-brown on the horizon,
                                     from here, in the inner west,
    the way I walk to work,                    
                       the block – the aboriginal housing co-operative – 
                                                                    demolished, gone.
         another set of glimpses,     whisps,   
  traces of people
              now      moved on.
                 on this frosty thursday morning 
only a small group of revenants   
               warming up around
                              a smoking 44-gallon drum.

The southbound eastern suburbs train speeds by the old Brett Whiteley matchstick sculpture faster than ignited saltpetre.


The Art Gallery of New South Wales' incomplete frieze of artists' names zips by at the same speed, and none of the artists on the railway side that I mention in 'Saxe Blue Sky' are in this photo.

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