Ken Stone: Mountain Books

Mountain Books

Unwise in retrospect, our short cut

from Moonan Flat was via Barrington Tops,

its road with gearshift gradient and hovering views.

Melvil Dewey would have been appalled

at our car-boot’s disarrayed titles,

but we were moving house by increment.

A dozen outdated encyclopaedias

crowded the spare tyre,

while Descartes and Hume endured

under copies of Gardening Australia.

(This was no time for metaphysics.)

Middlemarch came along—

(we hardly had need of ballast).

Steinbeck enjoyed the dispossession of it all,

and Hemingway was there; Death in the Afternoon

portentous where windscreen gnats yielded to sleet.

This was high country of sudden change,

sleet turning to snow—and the inevitable puncture.

In five minutes books were on gravel, and snowflakes

settled upon Emily Bronte.

Snow further abstracted The Art of Georges Braque,

and mimicked flung cream across

Albert Bermel’s Definitive Account of Farce.

It obliterated the billet of timber recycled as Wordsworth.

On Barrington it takes no time for books

to entomb in snow. Even in summer

the road can become crisp parchment

recording and nullifying hieroglyphs

of currawongs and crows.

I repacked our books as clouds slumped,

and I had to be forgiven for mud smudging

The Story of Craft, and for Jane Austen aghast—

shimmying in dankness with Hemingway.

The encyclopaedias were left at the roadside.

Their knowledge ceased at 1960 and it seemed fitting

they be buried under page upon page

of gently wordless snow.

Ken Stone