2 Tough and Crazy people get together and consider life through the Oracle of the Animated Gif. They contemplate BILAMBIL CREEK. Bilambil because its the creek down the bottom of the Valley below the mango trees and the alpacas. Lizzy don’t know why its alwats muddy when it flows just a little further into the splendour of the Broadwater and then into the Tweed River and out to sea.
Down South, there are more creeks, creeks SHE knows very well. The Never Never and Gleniffer. And way back – her ancestors lived on Kinchela Creek. Born on places like Flattorini and Mud Island on the McLeay River. Seems another Great Grandfather fell down a mine shaft at Back Creek in Victoria and did a perish.
JACK LONDON. Why don’t you tackle Indian River, Daylight?” Harper advised, at parting. “There’s whole slathers of creeks and draws draining in up there, and somewhere gold just crying to be found. That’s my hunch. There’s a big strike coming, and Indian River ain’t going to be a million miles away.”
THE GLUGS OF GOSH C.J. DENNIS
Catch the four-thirty; your ticket in hand,
Punched by the porter who broods in his box;
Journey afar to the sad, soggy land,
Wearing your shot-silk lavender socks.
Wait at the creek by the moss-grown log
Till the blood of a slain day reddens the West.
Hark for the croak of a gentleman frog,
Of a corpulent frog with a white satin vest.
Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve anyone; it must husband its resources to live. But health or fullness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men’s necessities. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
FROM JOSEPH CONRAD: AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS
He looked proudly upon his work. With every passing year he loved more the land, the people, the muddy river that, if he could help it, would carry no other craft but the Flash on its unclean and friendly surface. As he slowly warped his vessel up-stream he would scan with knowing looks the riverside clearings, and pronounce solemn judgment upon the prospects of the season’s rice-crop. He knew every settler on the banks between the sea and Sambir; he knew their wives, their children; he knew every individual of the multi-coloured groups that, standing on the flimsy platforms of tiny reed dwellings built over the water, waved their hands and shouted shrilly: “O! Kapal layer! Hai!” while the Flash swept slowly through the populated reach, to enter the lonely stretches of sparkling brown water bordered by the dense and silent forest, whose big trees nodded their outspread boughs gently in the faint, warm breeze–as if in sign of tender but melancholy welcome. He loved it all: the landscape of brown golds and brilliant emeralds under the dome of hot sapphire; the whispering big trees; the loquacious nipa-palms that rattled their leaves volubly in the night breeze, as if in haste to tell him all the secrets of the great forest behind them. He loved the heavy scents of blossoms and black earth, that breath of life and of death which lingered over his brig in the damp air of tepid and peaceful nights. He loved the narrow and sombre creeks, strangers to sunshine: black, smooth, tortuous–like byways of despair. He liked even the troops of sorrowful-faced monkeys that profaned the quiet spots with capricious gambols and insane gestures of inhuman madness. He loved everything there, animated or inanimated; the very mud of the riverside; the very alligators, enormous and stolid, basking on it with impertinent unconcern. Their size was a source of pride to him.
All the burrowing animals go underground
during a fire and are safe. Birds, of
course, can fly to safety. Other animals use
natural fire breaks like creeks and ponds.
Animals learned how to deal with prairie
fires long before man was around!
Not my human
sadness, cuckoo,
but your solitary cry.
We see the poet on his trek, we hear the bird call, we feel the idea of aloneness as the bird speaks for the man. But it’s in a flash, not at the end of an elaborate argument. A novelist plants a forest, tree by tree. The poet, not liking this sort of labour, gets us to shut our eyes and breathe in the leaf smell. Poetry is a demanding shortcut; it requires us to climb fences and jump creeks. It may have a message, but the message is read through an experience other than the message itself
FROM POETICA
All wombats are diggers, as is suggested by their powerful front limbs. The burrows range from short (2 to 5 m) to extensive network systems of 20 to 30 m. The animal uses the short, flattened claws of the strong front limbs to dig into a hillside or creek slope. Rocks and loose earth are pushed out by the back legs. Animals then rotate, lying on their sides to enlarge the sides and roof.
Paula Poundstone quotes (American Comic, b.1959)
