11/5/2019 0 Comments Melbourne...This indigo city which is not grey, is not a thing but a situation or atmosphere or layers of living, beginning with the earth that hoards the bones, artefacts and lost words of ancient folk who are not my ancestors and to whom I wish to pay my respects, for over their unknowable songs, their past of togetherness, all one-ness, we laid our history of separate histories; single doorways, gates and grates and ghettoes of unique belief, of language, even our forensic presence – footprints, fragments of hair, skin that falls into the ever- transmuting light, which is not grey but the shimmering colour of a dove’s wing (think of the NGV, its moat and water- wall, the stone like fresh-cut lead, that stuff has crystals in it you know -- it’s not grey but indigo.) We plait ourselves into this place which offers itself, clean of account - we each know our discrete moment walking the swirling corridor of Collins Street in that renowned wind, past 101 and churches with dusty hides like elephants. This indigo city which lies beneath skies of milk or cobalt or Prussian blue or oppressive thunderclouds, such unspent force; elsewhere El Greco painted skies like ours. This theatre of breath and cloud is not grey, which has neither black’s eternal might Nor the polar finality of white and is indeterminate, is nothing; nothing will come of nothing: speak again. Smog and sunlight, air the hue of opals, veils of light shuffling through our laneways like a deck of cards, this ‘devil’s colour’ stands alone, until it reveals its secret on the ubiquitous necks of pigeons; indigo forfeits itself from alone to all one-one iridescence in the sun. First published in Reflecting on Melbourne, Poetica Christie Press
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