Chalk drawing with John Hughes, on the house of Joyce Hinterding and her partner
Photo: Simon Pockley
.
Waking from a dream
after visiting Lawson
I see myself
a bag of rats.
Rats all pour out
from a journey through night,
through a wet academic
blanket.
Missing
connections
between Mawson’s mushrooms,
and the Princess in the art gallery,
Lindsay’s tailed nymph by the pool
Smiled to remind me
of the race I made
into the bush
years ago.
I was the bush that day,
and the birds and sky,
before I became
that bag of rats,
contained
by words.
.
.
I have the start of another journey
through lines of thoughts,
and it’s writing like this, and my voice in moving lines…
interconnecting with other people’s thoughts…
My thoughts in dialogue with the world as a mathematical object
and asking, Is it so logical?
.
The final version of the poem (well, at least for the moment) here.
On waking from the dream, I realised (dreams being what they are) that I am all those characters: the rat-tailed nymph, the princess, and the wet blanket.
And the mushrooms?
When Douglas Mawson was young, with Shackleton’s 1907-09 Nimrod expedition, he wrote a ‘dream’ story called Bathybia, in which mushrooms grow inside Mount Erebus.