Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: street life

jousting

Guy sauntering through the pretty part of town with a flashing, winking keychain, silver and the size of a beer coaster, jouncing at his groin. Its flashing and winking caught my eye, and then he caught my eye, with a smug, knowing look which spurred the mean hope that he may never get close to any woman again.

Girl wheeling her bike alongside the lake, its rear wheel throwing up pinkish white blossom in tissuey arcs. I walked behind her like a bridesmaid, the bottoms of the green Spring trees stroking soft as mothers across the crown of my head.

May 26, 2013
heart of stones

I walked downstream to the picnic place where someone had made a heart of stones and filled it with pads of moss. The stones have gone now but the moss remains and some of it has taken root. A wet Spring. It makes not a green heart shape exactly, but something like. Heart like a blob. Heart like jelly, like a cloud.

May 20, 2013
coffee breathe

I was in a strange city recently, got lost, felt overwhelmed momentarily, & needed comfort. Ducked inside a Guitar Shop to touch all the guitars. You pluck one string and wait for it slowly to come into stillness. At the back a man in a fisherman’s cap was playing a song of his own, I think, for the politely-smiling Guitar Shop man… they sat on matching, facing stools and one leaned in and one leaned back. Leaving the shop I felt just that bit more tuned in to sounds and to music, the traffic seemed rhythmic and spare, I kept hearing in the street the repeated curve-notes of a wolf whistle from somewhere high, or far away. Five times, six times, seven times, eight: was it a nerdy, somewhat serious guy who having gotten up the courage to catcall was now determined the object of his passing affection would not walk by without learning how beautiful he found her? Actually it was two college girls, leaning out of a fifth-storey window wolf-whistling their friend who was unlocking her bike oblivious in a stand of bikes downstairs, her hair wrapping itself around her in the wind. Wit-wheel! Wit-wheel! is how my ex used to spell it (and say it): Wit-wheel!

I went into a crowded little food boutique that had a whole wall of small-brew beers. They had beautiful, grotesque, weird, colourful labels. They were honey-coloured, molasses-coloured, golden, greenish, dark. I bought a chocolate wrapped in sardine-printed foil for a friend who is overcoming a phobia of fish. I went to the back of the store and picked up the brown-paper packages of whole coffee beans and held them to my face and breathed in.

May 20, 2013
hipsterest, like Everest

Call off the search! I think I may have found the world’s heppest hipster. All those people complaining that they’re not one can relax: this guy blows you out of the water. He is tiny and slight – built like Prince – and perched on his front steps in a crowded cafe street, wearing skinny black jeans, elfin boots, and a cunningly off-the-shoulder stripey sailor’s jumper. He caught my eye because his elbow was pointed above his head at a most uncomfortable angle – like an alerted bunny’s ear – as he gave himself a beard trim, slowly, searchingly, luxuriously, into a bevelled mirror on his lap, using a large pair of silver antique dressmaker’s shears.

May 16, 2013
you are wild, you are free

Scampering down the steep stone steps to gain the river path I met our neighbour, skulking behind the boat shed. He was smoking pot. I told him so. “You’re smoking pot!” ‘Ach,’ he said, ‘it’s just so…’ ~ waving his hand to encompass the day, the deepening afternoon, the greenery. “I agree,” I said, and we talked for a while about stinging nettles, and daisies. After that I walked for maybe an hour and didn’t meet anyone else nor their dog. Except for five shadows lurking on the other side of the river, sifting back and forth mysteriously in front of a huge raging fire they had built. The flames were leaping high and the mound of wood they’d set fire to was tall and triangular. This was under the long high roof of a storage shed thatched with bark tiles. Not thatched, exactly. I thought about the impenetrable Swissness of things, imagined the secretive signals by which they would have arranged they would meet up. A train went past a long distance away and at the same moment up on the hillside someone unseen let out a huge, scarifying shriek: the kind you let rip when the forest is all around mystifying you with its trees, and the sun won’t last much longer, it is time to be heading home to the domesticated landscape but for these few moments you are you, you are ancient, you are wild, you are free.

May 4, 2013
you are fire

Walking home past an outdoor restaurant in town that provides rugs for its hardier patrons. Everyone else was huddled indoors, it’s barely ten degrees and the wind is icy. A woman wearing a piled confection of blonded whipped hair drew on her cigarette as I passed and said, drawlingly, “…but it’s ok. I paid him in shag rate.” She saw me listening and fixed me with her eye and blew out a long, expressionless stream of blue smoke. Dragon lady! You are fire. I adore you.

April 30, 2013
a-biscuit, a-basket

O, the sweetest! Boy pedalling through the old part of town with his girlfriend in a wheeled box fixed to the front of the bike. It’s intended for children. He is wearing jeans and a stripey shirt and a little pork pie hat. Her blonde hair spills over the back of the box, she is tucked up in a blanket and eating a biscuit. At the traffic lights he slides forward off his seat and onto the ground, bends to give her a kiss in the small of her neck.

April 29, 2013
horsegrass

I met a horse. This horse had several large brown friends, in white socks, a kind of uniform they wore with insouciance, all of them living apparently in a big barn with straw trodden into its stained concrete. Horse life is boring, I suppose, when it’s under a roof. The horse fixed me with his eye as I was rambling by the river and compelled me by a kind of horsenosis to climb the hill and face him. We stood and stared at one another. I thought of the apple core I had thrown away in the brush. I told him, I haven’t brought you anything because… I didn’t know you were here. Somehow the horse or the grass itself put in my mind the idea that there was fresh green grass spurting everywhere plentifully out of the ground, only – he demonstrated with his head, ducking under the rails, and he had to do it twice before I got it – in a ring around the fenced enclosure all the grass was eaten to the nub. Poor horse. I said, “Would you like some grass? You can have some,” and bent to rip it. Laid my hand flat and offered it to his big lips and teeth. He showed me by knocking the stalks on the rail it is preferable to tear off the woody stems and clots of dirt. I should have thought of that. Next clump I harvested, I tore the stems across so he could eat the whole bundle, which he did. The other horses pawed impatiently at the rails. What stops them from jumping the fence? Only politeness, I imagine. I’m home now, hearing people moving about upstairs and the surprising bleat of sheep and throaty clong of sheep’s bells from a garden with no house in it, two houses away. I can see an Ikea stool belonging to the next-door children and the blooming wild plums on the far side of the river that grow in clumps and look like smoke. It’s growing dark now and the Indonesian lamps inside the house make yellow splashes on the scenery.

April 21, 2013
fado menu

Well, I’m never leaving here. Restaurant down some tiny steps with a hand-lettered menu in the window and a tiny castle built out of corks. On ordering sardines what you get is a plate piled with whole grilled fish and a small mound of potatoes, boiled then tossed in butter. Everything perfectly simple. We ordered half the dessert menu and dipped our spoons contentedly. A very drunk man wearing double denim (I explained to my companion this could also be a verb: you’re not *double deniming*, are ya?) made his way up and down the stairs repeatedly, with determined attention and heavy breathing with effort. The owner stood in the narrow doorway smoke from his cigarette filling the room; his luscious daughter and her mother, a jowlier, fuller version, ran between the tables. In fact after poring over the Portuguese menu for a while I asked the daughter had they a menu in English. She summoned her father. He unfolded his glasses and peered into a few blue vinyl folders before triumphantly producing a version neatly typed in French. By comparing the two versions we could triangulate. Near midnight a man came in with his guitar and tuned up at the counter. His songs were written on laminated cards, he considered them for over half an hour. Then he turned to the long table of local people – there were only 14 of us in the restaurant – and began to play, inviting the room to the chorus. A bosomy lady in ferocious print danced, shimmying her hips expertly and directly in front of the face of the younger man, maybe 50, who had come in with his friend and who she evidently thought was a bit of alright. The singer sang on and she danced solemnly, proudly, stomping a little on the turns. Flushed and excited she raced up to the singer and whispered in his ear. “Another time,” he said in Portuguese: something like “Un autre mal.” I was mortified for her. She crossed between the head of the table and the serving counter with some difficulty and sat down, her bosom heaving. But within minutes she too was singing along with the rest of us, lustily but not loudly. When we left, the prize male and his elderly neighbour looked over their shoulders to say with careful enunciation, “Heff… a good… evening.” “Obrigada,” I said, “you too!” The beautiful one said, “Alfama! Ees beautiful!” Oh yes, I said, my hand on my breathing: beautiful. “And the people…” “Wonderful!” Steep, cobbled, gristly with careening streetcars: yes, wonderful.

April 10, 2013
a last-minute shimmy of the hips

Last night was the first evening in Portugal for either of us & we wanted to hear fado. Went for an evening stroll, and lo! on the first hilly corner was a handwritten sign saying, Fado Tonight. And on the next corner! And the next! We’re in the old quarter and fado is a boom industry. Touts walked backwards in front of us, crooning, Just buy one drink & entry’s free. Prices in the fado restaurants are oddly Scandinavian. We kept climbing. Up a side street festooned with colourful laundry, pelargoniums spilling from plastic pots, was a stooping little bar with crumbling steps. The bar owner was affable and had a genial, rubbery face. We ordered dessert. In a shadowy corner two fellows were playing guitar. One of them tilted his curly head back against the wall and began to sing. After his first song there was a modest commotion at the doorway: up there at street level stood a small, gleaming, bald man of 70 or 75 resplendent in a cream suit with wide lapels and the most gorgeous pale blue tie. He came down the steps and conferred with the musicians. Then standing easily with no affectation of manner he closed his eyes and sang. His voice was throaty and weathered, from time to time it throbbed. Caramel rice custard dissolved down my throat like sweet tears. He sang two songs and then vanished with a kind of conqueror’s wave. Then it was the turn of the bar owner, who turned up some canned background music and puffed out his chest. His voice was big and round, his gestures dramatic, he was a natural-born ham. His wife kept serving, stoically. He slid past all the tables and with three pinched fingers took up a trilby hat from the top of the cash register. Setting it on his head he went on singing, oh so roundly, oh so bigly. His wife behind him gestured to a table of Germans “two beers? oh, three? three beers” and as her husband simperingly launched a second song (“I sing just one more,” he said, “one more,” so apologetically that my heart rushed to love him and their hard-working marriage) she glided round the bar with three beers and presented them, carrying a little last-minute shimmy of the hips. He had tears in his eyes when he finished. Because music makes queens of us all.

April 9, 2013