Emperors of Snow at Aqua Alpine Hakuba

We stayed the week before Christmas at Aqua Alpine in Hakuba in the Hakuba Gorya village area, in the Nagano region of Japan. This was like arriving at a friend-you didnt-know-you-had's place, the staff at the hotel picked us up, organised our lift tickets, ski gear, ski lessons, schlepped our luggage into our snug log cabin and evidently, did an almighty Snow Dance so we had plenty of soft powder snow to land in when gravity overtook us on the slopes. People would materialise to shuttle us to and from the snow. One of the staff kindly took my gung-ho 16year old powder hound skiing, and helped dig him out of waist-high powder after an adventurous short-cut. The cottage caretaker took us to an Onsen and then out to a local restaurant. All effortlessly hospitable, and relaxed. I'm nearly dubious about blogging this as I am planning to go back next year, so maybe I should take that all back and say, Oh, it was Ok, sitting in front of the open fire, watching the snow slide off the roof, sketching the fir trees while the night fell like myself on a dodgy turn, but don't try to book, I believe it's full for the next two northern winters.


Snow amoibus at Aqua Alpine

Better than Ginger Bread Cottage

As a child I thought there was a jewel box hidden in my parent's house, I imagined there was a cache of pink cut glass rings - the ones with adjustable soft metal sizing - laid out in pink foam in the nailed tight plyboard box in my brothers' walk-in robe.

Years later, I realised the box was really the back of the bathroom cabinet. I got a lot of enjoyment out of those pink glass jewels that weren't there. Imaginery treasures are curiously satisfying.

Here is a central point where someone who might be interetested can see what bits of words, some links to work published in journals and ezines, and images that I have made.

Absent Knowledge

We are talking about knowing certain facts,

and he says, I know all that or used to,

it is only that I can’t remember.

Is this not knowing or forgetting

what you know? Perhaps the head holds

a trace of what was there,

perhaps it is there but can’t find

the way out; maybe it was there but left,

or there was a rumour that it was coming

but never did,

like the promised holiday ,

in Pennant Hills. At eight years old

I would lie in bed at night a hardly contained

precipice of anticipation that time

would take me to Pennant Hills and a big house

with a swimming pool. I can see

the façade of the house, the curve

of suburban street, where that house

I never went to might be - or even was.

Though I know I never went, maybe

somewhere, there is an unborn memory

of being there, and I am thwarted by absent knowledge

from enjoying what I did not do.

Carol Jenkins

From Voices from the Meadow Wollongong Workshop Anthology 2007 ( Five Islands Press)

Bambiraptor

The Going Down Swinging # 25 -special double CD edition has at last unwrappped itself in Sydney, with a lauch at the Last Bastion of Civilisation last Wednseday 25 September. I still don't know what is in this CD it apart from my spoken word poem Bambiraptor as I was incarcarated in an invention called Good Mummydom. I hope every one else had a good time at the launch party.

The fossil Bambiraptor’s importance in the evolutional of dexterity and the dissonant name gave me this rave by Blanche (Street Car Named Desire) - here she makes a play for Bambiraptor believing his tough and powerful persona is lined with tenderness, like Stanley. This poem is one of my bids to get fossils to colonise and take over the myth as the substratum of literature.

Show Me The Treasure

Emperors of Snow at Aqua Alpine Hakuba

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