Craig Smith

The heat is in honest service to
light, in dedication to afternoon
from high vantage in the garden
lectured to with blades by Leif’s
parents

thirty years ago, he takes solace
that children remember nothing
of being pre-verbal, nothing too
of being pre-determined, press
clippings

kneaded into blood and or bone
for the orchids, the rose garden
still where it was, the roots have
not plucked into little green feet
traipsing 

the lawn where the city organist,
Leif’s teacher, resides on the hill
(re: 1880 Darwin, “The Power of
Movement in Plants”). Katita has
the radio on.

The heat dwells in waves 
that hold their bodies significantly.
Time is rendered ambulate
in praise of last days, 
suspended 

heat that broadcasts its heat
as summer becomes entropic.

Leif likes the feeling of dying sun
against his house sitting,
Katita toward the information 
of her skin, brown broadsheets
that wave as she rotates,
her opinion pages now knee
pressed into blood and or bone

(when she moves the reportage
follows, a quarter million
trees per annual publication
in the old world, add residuals 
for each solar rotation of
pastoral crypto turbine text
generation, lenticular declivities

of her creases in motion, zinc
hand prints patted and 
dragged in waves across
her back, shoulders, knees
and doze, re: 1880 Darwin
and so on re: somnambulate
and so on). She has the radio on.

While Katita naps, Leif relapses
into reverie about recreating
a documentary he has never seen

(only thirty second snippets
on the national film and sound
archive website, 'Bastards
from the Bush' with Les Murray

and Bob Ellis, school mates
visiting locations of formative
significance) but would like
to reenact in his own way, he

would be Les and his mate 
would be Bob, they'd go back
to Warners Bay High School,
to the strip of fast food haunts

in Belmont, to invented sites
where they'll perform gestures
of realism, dress in costumes
of meaning, of neosimulacrum. 

While Katita rouses, Leif lapses
out of fictional autobiography
and becomes landscape again.

On the radio
the voice says everybody wants
to think they're the end of history.
The voice says there is a reason
the apocalypse beckons a party.
Otherwise, when would you know
it's time to pop the champagne?

On the radio
the voice says humanity is void
of meaning but not of ideology.
The voice says our consciousness
requires stories like lungs need air.
Necessary fictions - they do not
speak of the real, only the gap. 

On the radio
the voice starts to talk about what
it is to be Australian. Katita listens.

To be Australian 
is to play pinball 
in a coastal leisure centre 
in view of the beach 
and its silhouettes, 
its late century ocean sparkle
of Morse code diamonds 

threaded into the ten 
J. M. W. Turner paintings 
every man in his forties needs to see,

raised on the novels of Hermann Hesse
between wars, on the affirmations 
of Nietzsche on what it is to be Australian,
the Down Under Over Man, 
the Foster Tuncurry scene 
with New Journalists
sleeping on the sand, where ninety-two
in the shade is exactly thirty-three to the
decimal with an endless repetition 
of threes to the centigrade, 

apologies to the International Committee 
for Weights and Measures, 
apologies to Anders Celsius,
nineteen forty-eight in the shade, the same
day Columbia Records introduced the very
same ratio, a record 
that spins at thirty-three
and one-third revolutions per minute,

eighteenth June, when another revolution
spun out, the Malayan Emergency 
and how to be an Australian 
Avro Lincoln bomber is to drop 
two hundred and thirty-kilo affirmations, 

you think of this as an Australian when you 
mosey through Murrurindi on foot, 
along the wobble of the suspension bridge, 
the two-story garden shed 
with so many missing panes
the size of LP album covers, rattled out
perhaps by divine wind, 
the neighbouring yard housing 
so many reused glass bottles
filled with dirt brown water and offcuts of
native Australian labour, 

of a capacity to recite the lines 
of early Australian poets like Alby Pope, 
Wilko Ernie Henley, Frostey the Noman, 
Agro's Cartoon Connection, 
Hey Hey it's Alfie Tennyson
writing a stirring evocation 
of the first media war, 

of Churchill in the West Wing as 
Australia's first war president, of 
one Theirs not to make reply, 
two Theirs not to reason why, 
three Theirs but to do and die, with an
endless repetition of threes, 
thesis antithesis synthesis 
(although not necessarily in that order), 

it was easier to make a living when you
were writing, as an Australian, for entry

into the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 
an accessibility of meaning, a still-living god,
a child of eight and an octogenarian both
able to enjoy the recitation of verse, those
songs everybody knows so well rolled out
on the pianola in nursing homes, show tunes

from nineteen thirties Australian riverboat
space operas - On The Sunny Side Of The 
Street, Over The Rainbow, As Time Goes By, 
Beautiful Dreamer, Julia Jacklin covering
Someday by The Strokes, Holly Throsby
covering Berlin Chair by You Am I, Slowed
Reverb Test Drive by Joji, anything live on
KEXP, Samurai Pizza Cats Episode One,

Chopin's Opus Twenty Five Number Twelve
performed on the Light Organ, 
Marianna Simnett using 
machine learning to project
Australian species of light entertainment
onto her face, Corey Feldman 
on Howard Stern, Beniamino Gigli 
singing Handel's Largo for His Master's Voice 
with Herbert Dawson on the Light Organ, 

A Message to Young People 
by Andrei Tarkovsky 
delivered at the demolition of the Newcastle 
Council Carpark on the twenty-eighth of May 
two thousand and twenty-two at ten past 
twelve (just after midday), opposite the 
Cathedral, the graves of shipwreck victims

trying to make passage into the harbour, 
along the shoreline, you think of 
Australian writers such as Joseph Conrad 
and Hermann Melville, bunkmates 
on the Adolphe they left washed
against the breakwall at Stockton 
as if it wasn't their problem, as if 
they had nothing to do with the
romancing of water, 

when the customs agents
asked John Berger, when he emigrated to 
Australia, if he had any criminal convictions, 
and he replied, in his best Sherman's March,
that he didn't know 
this was still a requirement,

how this is very much not what it is to be an
Australian today, on Jimmy Stewart reading a
touching poem about his dog Beau, yes 

this is what it means to be an Australian, 
to live in the Tropic of Capricorn, 
the Largesse of the South, inventing 
the Cochlear implant and WiFi and
permanent crease clothing, 

on the first date we might imagine 
between Dymphna Cusack (of Black 
Lightning, The Sun Is Not Enough,  
Come In Spinner with Florence James, 
although not necessarily in that order) 
and William T Vollmann as depicted by 
Ron Howard in Grand Theft Auto 
about the life of Australian logician
Kurt Gödel, his pet name for Dymphna, 
Leonardo's Bride, she taking carriage 
of a research grant into the ecology of 
coastal communities, of the myths 
presented on the vertical backlit stands
of pinball tables, 

her a whimsigoth vision
crossing the floor of the leisure centre in a 
crimson corset and permanent crease 
starfield skirt, he in his most affordable 
Australian smile, not quite 

like that on the tarmac 
of a prisoner exchange 
so much as the curve suggested by
the presence of an inland empire, 

how it pulls everything in, 
how she pulled him towards her, 
allegedly, and said - 
'Advance'. 

Katita tweaks, she asks Leif, did the voice 
on the radio just say 'Advance' 

and Leif says remember Johann Müller,
how what we share, the closest thing 
to a human universal, is our innate capacity 
to get things wrong, and Katita says,
well how do I call in to find out, and
Leif says that pirate radio doesn't have
a talk back line, and Katita says
says who, and then says well I'm going
to find the station, and then she picks
up the radio, still with decent charge
with its three C-size batteries, and walks
the wireless down the hill into the city. 

Leif watches her descend into 
Summer as he reclines into 
an absence already replaced
by a company of interior voices.
 
Perhaps he should recreate
all of YouTube now that
it is gone, the Internet Archive
gone, no books or CDs left
to refer to, no media other
than memory - blessed day.

From Tyrrell to Newcomen
and then Church and Bolton
Katita is lowered into the
magma phasing heat of the
city, sure the smell of salt
from the sand is in the air
but otherwise it's just tar
and glass and radio sputter.

The signal amplitude grows pregnant 
and not between gaps in geometry, 
waving voice and not, distortion
from a four-piece cutting in
at the Royal Exchange
as bowed guitars are fed into
a Moog vocoder ring modulating
power chords and the sparking of a 
dodgy 1/4" cable that leaks Angel smiles.

There is a voice that might be
a crossed transmission
cutting in on Katita's radio,
the same pirate frequency
or near enough, it says
I just want to make pretty
women laugh forever, it says
miracles shouldn't go on 
forever, it says that to be happy
is to forgive oneself for existing
(but not forever, just for a while),
it says meaning is the structure
we impose on the void (but not
etcetera, just for etcetera), it says
that to remain a nihilist into
middle-age is an act of courage
and rebellion that should result
in transmissions of love forever.

This is an ordinary devotion
to the long afternoon of youth,
to the laughter of audiences
of long-dead stand-up comics,
to the mumbling of chatbots
and morning pyjama topologies. 

The Summer feels significant. 
Katita doesn't know if it's the
holiday vibe, the combination
of Christmas and New Years,
but it's there.

You can feel it all around you.
Mornings are wide balconies
and spaghetti strap leanings,
the breeze means something
real, potential.

Skateboard lunches motivate
absolution in oceans present
and imagined, windows open
and imagined, linguistics shy
to offer more. 

Say less, relax like you're dead
with bonus life cheat codes in
the back of a foreign magazine 
featuring a centrefold of cyber
pastoralism. 

Our local data farms have been
stacked with endless Summers.

The Summer feels significant
when Leif thinks back to high
school and modem sleepovers 
when websites were new, new
economics. 

A pizza company made a page
where you could order online
in a novel way without paying
first, you waited till the driver
turned up. 

Leif and his mates ordered one
or two pizzas as a prank using
the poorly coded web form not
sure it even worked, hit refresh
a few times. 

What do you know, the delivery
vans just kept arriving as if in a
parade, streaming internet food 
(twelve pizzas I heard?). Finally
they stopped.
 
The prank target was the host of 
a televised morning fitness show.

On the radio
the voice keeps on now about what
it is to be Australian. Katita listens.

To be Australian is 
to ignore the bridge load limit, 
to ignore both the maximum vehicle 
mass and maximum speed, and 
when the sign says only one vehicle 
at a time on the bridge 
you question whether that includes the 
cloud of dragonflies bundled 
like a voluminous airship, pressing 
their domain from a high angle, like that 
of a camera phone pressed at a high angle 
above the faces of snapdragons and 
fibre cloth and five o’clock pansies, 
to be captured and then 
shared with no one, 

to knock off at five o’clock and 
park your wife in the car outside The Kent 
while you walk in for a beer and then 
sometime later walk out to pass her 
a glass of lemon squash 
through the car window, 

for to be Australian is 
to appreciate chain reactions, 
to direct high volumes of light 
at peanut butter to make it glow, and 

to be Australian is 
to wear Day-Glo to a funeral 
during your lunch break, the necessity 
of the living, even though 
you make everybody in your perimeter 
a target now, from a high angle, 

you and everyone you confuse with love 
are now in the mortal crosshairs, too visible, 
for to be Australian is to crave visibility 
within the fog of great southern anonymity, 
the invisible green and the sense of gold 
still on the statue of St Joseph’s head 
as you light a candle exclusively 
for the intent of powering stable
cryptocurrencies, and so say all of us, 

during a final call for drinks, 
the one who says he will shout 
the entire pub a nightcap, 
the way grandfathers look 
upon this man as one who has 
reached the highest estimation, 
the better angles of our nature, 
and so say all of us. 

By echo double and white noise halo 
Katita thinks she is getting closer to
the source (and and so so say say all
all of of us us ccacrkzsashhadvance).

Conceptual art students are forming
a ladder of bodies up to the top floor
of Bolton Street Carpark, surfers are
taking their chance at riding it down

in one smooth amplitude, like Ninja
Turtles mid-Cowabunga, part of the
handshake social contracts between
athletic cores and Doc Martin poets

smoking and drinking beers outside
the empty post office near the YMCA
while slow dancing to coal ship horns
and the rub of earth's roof on heaven.

Historians designate this Last Summer.

A pucker lips so soft and rue roll on in
Leif’s highlight reel of road trips
with Katita to postage stamp towns 
offering Chew Choo Takeaways
that are never open, cafeterias sidled
on brassware antique stores also never open, 
antique trees in long grass fields ready to 
elevate, paperbark rockets from the old world, 
song lines and antinomies of current locales:

Katita looks like a plastic token sliding 
across a board game from on high in the 
organist’s garden, Leif pincers his fingers 
as binoculars, avoiding right-wing gestures, 
see now as she skips past the ladder but
snags a snake that drags her east
through a laneway with a shower for
residents to wash saltwater off, though
now it is used by late-night lovers 
who act so offended when they are
yelled at to stop, but we’ve brought soap
they say, come on brother, but this
isn’t the sixties, not even the nineties,
this is a period without suffix, ahistorical. 

Historians designate this Vast Bummer.

A group shot of them and their friends
behind a six-pack of soft white loaf rolls
and a tub of coleslaw, all their smiling
faces, or very nearly smiling, very nearly
all, mirror balls swaying on the beach.
On the beach. 
On the beach. 

That's where the radio host says they'll
going to avoid speech, handing off
the headphones to Katita, 
she found them on the ground floor
of the Returned and Services Leagues club
or very nearly, not quite a radio host, they
are a broken window sash waltzed
by salt currents, flung against a telegraph
key that transmits a capacity to synthesize 
the human voice, it like all sound
just a series of binary pulses 
converted into pitch due to a time delay
ranging from imperceptibly small gaps
to tens of thousands of years, organ music
like that of the piece being played right now
in Saint Burchadi church in Halberstadt,
the chord changes in the first part of the 
composition will occur in forty-six years.

Leif won't be around to hear it. 
He can't hear it now. He can't hear
Katita as she decides not to say
anything into the microphone 
about what it means to be Australian
because there is no microphone
and she has nothing to say. She just hums. 

She hums the melody from We'll Meet Again
by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles, sang,
of course, by Vera Lynn - did you know
it features the first usage of a polyphonic
synthesizer on a music recording, that's
what Leif will one day tell their daughter 
as he looks at the water - did you know
that water is a viable data storage medium,
you can fit a terabyte of household data
in a tablespoon if it's part of a solution
containing 12-nanoparticle clusters at a
concentration of three percent. How many
selfies could the ocean hold, how many 
large language models and simulations of
the life to come. Leif will meet Katita on
the beach soon where the heat is still and
is still in honest service to light, heat that
broadcasts its heat in collapsing waves.