Where journeys begin and end

By Vita Forest

 

This morning at the oval

I walked by lanky legged men in white flannels

Standing about on the grass

And a woman pushing a pram around the white picket perimeter

And a troupe of elderly Chinese

Limbering up

Following the leader in two lines

Dancing to the tune of a small tinny speaker

While their handbags and shopping hung on the fence

On hooks they had brought

especially for that purpose

And as I passed the playground

I noticed the gates were topped with a pair of

Smiling crocodiles

Beaming down at the squealing children

 

And as I stood on one leg in the yoga class

trying to keep my balance

While trains thundered beneath us

The teacher boasted how when tested

The results said she must be a mere girl of twenty

 

While later on the train

A mere girl of twenty

Addressed the whole carriage with her tale of

Domestic violence, pregnancy and homelessness

And I emptied my pockets into her open hand

And thought that in another life

She could be a great orator

And I hope that life is yet to come

 

And at Central I sat on an empty railway platform

and drew the trains

as the wires above me

drew their own squiggles against the clouds

And later we met under the archway of rainbow balloons

Heralding Mardi Gras

Like the rainbow flags that draped shoulders and the rainbow socks

on rainbow legs and rainbow hats and rainbow cat ears

resting over pink hair and glitter eye lashes

Or perhaps just over a t-shirt reading

Fearless

 

We met beneath the rainbow

to see the world through others’ eyes

Through their palettes and pens and pencils

That they used

Hunched behind a cup of tea

Or standing in front of a statue

Or a stain-glass window

Or beneath the curved roof over the place

Where journeys begin and end

 

And in the end

Who’s to really know?

If the train was really there

If the door was really open

If he really held her hand

But it looks real enough for now.

Big cat in the city

By Vita Forest

A giant cat lounging on the grass beneath the jacaranda trees, the train clattering over the elevated tracks behind it.

I’ve been pacing up and down, forward and back, looking at the tiger from every angle, judging the view and judging the heat of the sun, the amount of shade, the location of seats and weighing up whether I will be able to sit there and draw comfortably.  But I want to focus on the tiger’s head, I want to look right into its eyes, so I choose this place, beneath this tree in front of the MCA on the lawn.  The ground is slightly damp, so I look in my backpack and find a scarf.  I drizzle it into a puddle of fabric and it falls from my hand in layers and layers, a spiral on the damp grass.  I sit cross-legged on my fabric seat in the shade of the tree and look across at the tiger.

I remember Quentin’s sketch of this same cat, his use of watercolour, how he caught the vibrant golden yellow.  But I have not brought my paints today.  I will have to catch it another way.  I rummage through my pencil case and find my graphite pencil, 6B – capable of the darkest blacks at the press of my fingers.  I decide to use that.

I map out the figure on my page, lightly drawing in the bulk of the body, the angle of the head.  The tiger’s toes are often obscured by children bouncing on its limbs (before its keeper in an official high-vis vest tells them off) and adults stepping boldly between the tiger’s paws to smile at a camera, to catch the encounter forever, though they have hardly stopped to look, hardly paused to stare up into the eyes of the tiger.

I stroke its face with my pencil and it seems to like that, it rocks back and forth as if dancing, as if moving in time to the clashing cymbals accompanying the lion dancing somewhere out of sight in The Rocks.  Its eyes emerge on my paper, its stripes, the shadows that I notice when the sun bursts through the clouds in a brilliant dazzle.  Is it watching me from those deep streaked eyes, or is it looking over my head to the ferries, or across the bay to the pink gridded pig snuffling beneath the sails of the Opera House?

Does it welcome the rain that splatters my paper, that sends us all running and huddling for a few brief minutes beneath the deep overhand at the entrance to the MCA, that leaves watercolour fireworks, a happy accident amongst Lara’s bright sketch of fighting cockerels?  Perhaps it is a longed-for respite, those fat drops that pit its tight yellow skin, that staccato drumming across its shoulders.

The rain stops as quickly as it starts and I return to stand beneath the shade beneath the tree, the ground too wet to sit on now.  I cradle my sketchbook in my arm and continue to breathe life into the outline on my page.  It’s strange what your mind notices in these moments – the colours of the tiger’s stripes are also found in the carriages and doors of the trains that streak beneath the Cahill Expressway and onto Circular Quay.

And after I have met up with the other sketchers, after we have admired each other’s work and told our stories and taken our photos and said our farewells, after I have caught the train home and made a cup of tea and lain down to rest on the couch, one of my own cats, my Isaboe, casually walks along the length of my body before settling, purring, like a sphinx on my chest, weight on her forelegs, in a pose that mirrors that of the big cat in the city.

See the train in the background?

 

A Sydney Christmas

By Vita Forest

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!  This is how I spent the day…

• Woke to a chorus of brightly coloured lorrikeets outside my window.
• Polished and tinkered and tested new synonyms for my novel’s logline and synopsis (the hardest 300 words I have written).
• Swam my first kilometre of the summer at Balmoral Beach.
• Enjoyed the coolness of the water as the weather heated up.
• Watched children testing out their new Christmas presents – surfboards, balls, blow-up rings under a clear blue summer sky.
• Cut up fragrant mint and parsley leaves for a salad.
• Spoke to my children, off in Tasmania with their father.
• Drove my parents to my sister Molly’s house for a family Christmas where I was
• Greeted by a young Jedi brandishing his new light sabre.
• Drank champagne and lashings of cold water to stay cool.
• Sat under a ceiling fan and ate cold meats, cheese, dips, bruschetta, crackers, crusty bread, olives and lots of different salads (a fab cold Christmas lunch on such a hot day).
• Wore silly hats after pulling Christmas crackers.
• Watched my niece and nephew squealing and hurling themselves down their new blow-up waterslide and paddling pool that just fits into their little inner-city backyard.
• Read books about dinosaurs with the young Jedi.
• Promised my niece some holiday sketching outings.
• Discussed possible names for the new bubbas about to arrive in the family.
• Chatted to my sister as we cleaned up the kitchen.
• Opened presents brought to us by the Christmas elves (my niece and nephew).
• Arrived home feeling pooped.
• Lay on the couch and binged on Das Boot on SBS On Demand (recommended).

I like to look at beautiful things

By Vita Forest

Yesterday I saw

• From the train – mauve jacaranda blossoms rubbing shoulders with swathes of magenta bouganvillea blooms.  The sight of it momentarily silenced the woman behind me on the train in mid-sentence.
• The headland of Barangaroo on the approach from Wynyard.  Noticing how the lush terraces of Sydney trees are now obscuring the paths along the hillside.
• The splendid sight of all those beautiful clay vessels at the Clay Canoe stall at the Finders Keepers Market at Barangaroo.  All those layers and lines of vases and sculptures, as if a bunch of drawings from Shaun Tan’s books had come to life and were congregating together.  I mentioned this to one of the owners – apparently I was not the first to make such a comparison.  They did not know Shaun Tan’s work and were going to have to look it up…
• A gorgeous gal from my class who noticed me as I stood lounging in the shade of the entrance of The Cutaway sketching the Stoop Bros’homemade, steam punk airstream trailer.  Kids are always amazed to discover I don’t actually live at school…
• Sketchers perched in shadowy spaces under trees on the terraced steps on the hills of Barangaroo.  After a week of crazy, unpredictable weather, it was hot and sunny.
• A family paddling barefoot in the water lapping over the sandstone slabs at Nawi Cove, Barangaroo.
• A nifty paint palette made by one of the sketching gang from a tiny fishing tackle case.
• The smiles on the faces of the Stroop brothers as we surprised them by holding up our sketches of their stall.

I chatted to one of the potter-extraordinaires from Clay Canoe as I stood admiring their wares.  I explained that I was not in the market for another of their vases just at that current moment (having already bought one very recently).  ‘So you just like looking at beautiful things?’ she remarked.

Indeed.  Indeed I do like to look at beautiful things.

View from the bridge

By Vita Forest

Sepia scene

holding Max’s hand as he kicked along

in bright red raincoat

exclaiming at trains and pylons and ferries and puddles

everything washed new and clean and bright

Little fireman

out for a stroll in the rain

Film footage

sweeping across the span by leaps and bounds

rehearsing dance steps

barefoot exhilaration

A swan escaped from the lake

free enough to feel that

Anything was possible

Zoom into frame

The descent on the narrow staircase

Singing show tunes and

Finding that pair of abandoned heels

(Cinderella realising she may as well lose

Two if she was letting go of one)

Trying on those glass slippers and discovering

they were just my size

Walking through city streets

In someone else’s shoes

Eryldene 2018

By Vita Forest

Under the red pavilion

In the quiet of the garden

Brushing my pencil over the white to

Build the retreat out of triangle and square

Stretching up a pink angophora

from the bottom of the page

Listening to the lorrikeets against the softly misting rain

And the scratch of the brush turkey beneath the camellias

Under the deep roof of the verandah

Sipping tea

Cosied under a knitted posy

Spreading scones with cream and jam

And coaxing out the rough bark of a jacaranda

As I chat to Kate

Sipping coffee and eating scones as

she waits for her paint to dry.

Domain concert

By Vita Forest

Remember hanging upside down

sweat blooming behind our knees

hair a trailing shadow flame

hands trailing the ground in surrender?

The fig leaves have heavy bodies

Snap when you bend them

snap and spray

They have solid reliable edges

Like the bats

journeying above us

black umbrellas darting  over

pink seashell sky

I lie back on the picnic blanket

and watch them as fireworks glitter overhead

and ants get drunk

in forgotten gulps of champagne

This week

By Vita Forest

Near Woolwich Dock, Sydney

This week or so I have been

WRITING

• Blue Gum (for Lucy)
• A poem and a short story for a competition

READING

• We are all completely beside ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
• La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

LISTENING to podcasts on ABC Radio

WATCHING Killing Eve on ABC iView

Woolwich Dock

WALKING around

• Willoughby
• the Lower North Shore
• Hunters Hill and Woolwich

Cherry blossom in Hunters Hill

Blue Gum (for Lucy)

By Vita Forest

Where you enter

we heard

The angry screeches of white cockatoos

Glimpsed white flashes wheeling in the blue sky

above the silver-trunked treetops

Watched as they swung around and about and around again

As we descended into green shade

You may hear the sound of six species of frogs

And we did

or at least we heard one

singing its percussive scraping

as we picked our way beside the creek

over mossy rocks and

fretted roots aslant

under the lacy shelters of tree ferns

Continue straight to where a track comes in from the left

and follow the blue wren

It was the blue wren that showed us the way

The hop of the wren along the dried spikes of grass

The scratch of the bush turkey in the undergrowth

And down in a dappled gully

A warbling chorus of currawongs

Across the bridge, stop for lunch

Sitting cross-legged by the river and

pinching a peck of grated carrot

on a smattering of grated beetroot

laid on the soft spongy whiteness of

the halved baguette piled with shards of

cheese and khaki rounds of

pickles and leaves of

lettuce and slivers of

translucent cucumber closed between

the covers of two golden crusts

and two rows of teeth.

At the first junction

Walking past the facilities and

missing the ghostly W

that means the girls enter

at the door marked OMEN and

Return to the start of the walk.

This week

By Vita Forest

On the Two Creeks Track, Roseville

This week I have been

WRITING and REWRITING poems

READING Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine by Gail Honeyman

RETURNING to school

PRACTISING

• for our big audition for an inter-school performance at the Sydney Opera House
• for an item at assembly
• for an item at a school performance night

Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney

VISITING Hyde Park Barracks on a school excursion

ATTENDING Writers’ Circle and having a good laugh and a good chat and a good listen to some good writing

MAKING mandalas in the playground out of found materials with a bunch of Year 3 and Year 4 children

Gordon Creek, Two Creeks Track, Roseville

WALKING and TALKING with Saskia and Vastra at Roseville and Waverton

Wattle trees on the Two Creeks Track

SPENDING time out in the winter sun (it’s warmer outside than in here in Sydney)

SEEING a whole crowd of women doing Tai-chi with coloured parasols beside Chatswood Oval.