‘Clunk & Jam’ has arrived. Three years in the making. Hand typed on an old typewriter. Printed locally with vegetable base ink and stitch bound (in Perth, Western Australia). Kind contribution of cover art by Stormie Mills and other contributed art by Harley Manifold within.
The making of Clunk & Jam (at home above).
The Woodbridge Post Office Lady .
I push it through. A passing without meeting. An intimate exchange. Will she sniff where I’ve been? Add another layer of touch? A crease in the handling? Hold its journey up for how long?
A tantalising story with its imaginary end. Somewhere beyond the slot. And to know would spoil this hush exchange. The chance to build towards another. And another. Until the next.
Or maybe it just fell unnoticed into a bag? My story tells me more.
Footnote: Wrote this piece on holiday in Tasmania because I was posting postcards back home, and the friend I was staying with talked about this “Woodbridge post office lady” he’d come to know through his daily visits to collect and post mail.
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It was a hold your nose situation.
Like getting out of bed in the morning … making a long put off phone call … taking the next step … or a difiicult one … venturing into unknown or familiar but rather not go places … facing a lurking fear … a dreaded occasion … but always, always well prepared for the consequences of her actions … or that which might be thrust upon her by those both, unexpected … and expected that could happen at any undesignated moment in time. This made her relatively secure in the knowledge of all subsequent happenings. Phew. No wonder her head was spinning.
Shedding Skin On Sunset Beach .
A sleepy sun leaves buoys with faces to trace lingering steps on icing sugar sand, chilled by the late afternoon. The chalky white drift of a pelican patch invites the mind to float, as a school tickles the surface and jetty sticks stretch long into the sound. And when thought interrupts to say, “You know it won’t last”, and “Time is never so still”. You take that moment back into a sandy pocket and leave the hurry behind.
(Picture from ‘World of Wonder’ book found on Ruth’s farm. Find in Clunk & Jam book.)
Sand Castles .
A tide of words, only of mine, lap at an unwelcoming world. And therein the rise and fall is the most masterful play for place. Where, within its shallow strip, I catch my ‘self’.
(Find in Clunk & Jam book.)
Take A Number .
To halt her nearing steps posed too great a threat to her new life found. To not allow the creative surge to complete its course, would be to steal from herself at the very moment her ‘self’ she’d found.
(Image from book, ‘World of Wonder’. Find poem in Clunk & Jam book.)
