Five Easy Pieces
Scrawling compulsively everyday, not enough time to tweak and primp these words, but I've grown accustomed to sharing and these are busy house moving days- this is like me saying, here, step over the cardboard boxes and let's drink coffee out of plastic wine glasses.
June
29, 2012
Unfinished
Family
Day.
After
lunch, two dead palm trees are cut down. Baby sits naked in a bowl of pasta. Dog runs her rope around the bench and any other available legs. Boy is up the
tree, bow-saw brandishing. Grampa Jim directs. There are pak choi flowers in
the salad- edible flowers, my best kind. Scattered family gathers, comfortable
on a selection of garden furniture, the six year gap is nothing.
June
30th 2012
Unfinished
Family
Wedding Day.
Children
we have seen brand new to the world; crumpled, tiny; they surprise us: hand us
their children; walk down aisles in beautiful costumes; grow taller than us.
Cousins at play on the bouncy castle here, while we say, oh, it will be their
turn, scary, soon.
Stuff.
I’m
sat in the passenger seat, looking in the wing mirror; now in the mirror, tired
brain is rambling, things are backwards but someone stood in front of you, that
can see what the mirror sees, how can it be that they don’t see you backwards?
Because
the mirror can’t see you, idiot, I tell it. It is only reflecting. And it’s who, who can see what the mirror sees.
Brain
slides out of my ear like a sulky blancmange.
Unfinished
First
Impression
The
middle of the summer months arrives. It finds us preoccupied, busies itself
making cloud shapes. I write the date on the minutes for the Instructors
Meeting with a guilty hand. Yesterday I watched three quarters of the moon over
a supermarket car park and no-one but me was looking up. Yesterday’s clouds
were a whole other hovering planet of terrain and everything was alien. I
scowled at an earth-slob dropping his cigarette butt on the tarmac. June was so
distracting: is this how summer is? Is this how we are? The date is arguably
irrelevant, since every day only happens once, and, likewise arguably, to give
a day a name is to acknowledge the unique moment of it.
July
2, 2012
Unfinished
"How does one become a
butterfly?" she asked pensively. "You must want to fly so much that
you are willing to give up being a caterpillar."
[Trina Paulus: Hope For
The Flowers]
Ran
through the high-sided lanes this morning; when the air is damp; as the wide
awake hedgerows quiver and flit. Dog humours my pace. It is our usual route,
only I follow the circle to the right: the hills are steeper upwards and the
slight gradient of the flatter section runs downwards, so I struggle most at
the start. Flowers sway, graceful, represent the ease to which I aspire.
July 3, 2012
Unfinished
Metal on metal noise of friction directs my car to the
garage. My transportation method for the rest of the day is two boot-clad feet.
Back along the lanes, under the rain mist, daydreaming of shallow seabed, the
hedges are land reefs of curling green corals. House martins shoal past; they
have a speed and a languor of motion that suits an underwater pace. Work at our new house is kind of tidal
too, I decide: after my lunch I will press forwards with it again. Dog leaps
dolphin style over the garden hedge. This is how it is, in the dull weather, the bright lures of thought catch the real light of things.
Comments
Or wine out of Styrofoam coffee cups? :)