Politikon Zoon

The Vodka, Borsch and Tears is an old-world style tavern in Windsor that we kept circling back to. Boasting over 100 premium European vodkas and some 30 different absinthe brands, it was the perfect place to infuse concentrated alcohol into sponge-brained writers.

One night found the proprietors faced with four genius-surly poets, flaming Green Fairy absinthe (distilled in huge vats in someone’s Melbourne backyard), pitchers of Stolichnaya, random poetry shootings, solid food as an afterthought, gypsy troubadours going table to table, James O’Dwyer’s futile attempts to convince a waitress to fellate him while he recited Dylan Thomas, and a brawl over the right to lick the remnants of a vanilla martini from Sal’s right breast.

Then the four of us flew out into a drunken stumble on and off trams as Sal misdirected us on a confusing excursion through urban jungles, punctuated by the most obscene joke-telling marathon this salty-sailor has ever encountered.

Various innocent Melbournites were accosted and viciously mugged with puns, rhymes and archaic expletives. I had nothing to do with it, I can assure you (especially if you happen to work for Australian immigration and have anything whatsoever to do with future travel-visa approvals for Americans).

At the Vodka, Borsch and Tears. On the left, Australian poet and firefighter, Scotty Blake. Scotty contributed two fine poems to issue #3 of Soundzine: link One helluva great bloke and raconteur! On the right, Australian poet, Kung Fu expert, steel-banjo playing wildman, and world-class pun-meister, James O’Dwyer, known to DAers as Darkcrescendo. In the center, yours truly. Behind the camera, the Australian Poet Lariot, Salli Shepherd. You can’t see it, but her hair had caught fire from the flaming absinthe. We were polite enough to wait until the picture was snapped before dousing her in Guinness. From there, things began to deteriorate rapidly.

Sal, her daughter Sarah, and I set off for Phillip Island from Melbourne one day. It was a chilly spring morning and strong winds tossed and buffeted the compact rental I drove, with precarious deliberation, down the “wrong” side of the road.

We came to the Great South Sea at the town of Tooradin where the road began to hug the shoreline. We stopped and got out at a small city park that sat atop towering bluffs of reddish sand, outlined for miles against the gray-green water of the harbor.

Sarah ran ahead, down and down the crisscrossing wooden steps, her auburn hair a shimmer-whip feather in the wind’s wing.

In the distance, along the horseshoe shore and set back near the cliffs, a garden of quaint blue, yellow and green beach cottages sprouted like mushrooms.

We breakfasted at a small cafe on deep-water docks. Coffee for Sal and me, pancakes with ice-cream and a steaming cup of hot chocolate for Sarah.

As we walked slowly back, arm in arm, Sarah kept 5, 10 or 15 meters ahead of us, dashing toward gulls or kneeling to scoop up treasures from the long shore.

We breathed the wind-tossed mist of that amazing spring morning, and to this day I see Sarah flash out toward the breakers as if she could gather the sea in her arms and whirl it into some secret shadow of a throne or castle and hand it back to us as a gift. And there, once only, there as the waves broke with the menace of their want, I was certain she knew that I’d found my own young man’s heart in the genius of her mother’s eyes, and the euphony of her mother’s voice.

But then, like a hawk on blue wing, sunlight flew across the sky to gentle the waves, and the racing joy of her shadow became one and the same with ours.

So we climbed to our car and left to find Phillip Island’s koalas, ‘roos, and penguins, and I know it as one day I will never have to be sorry for.

Sarah above the Tooradin beach.

Gentled waves…