Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: taking care of the place

riverside grave

A melancholy day. We visited the grave of my friend’s husband. The room where I am sleeping is filled with his things, fishing trophies he won and a fearsomely engraved pewter hard hat with his name on it and, from underneath as I gaze up at the glass shelf, a space where his mind once was.

The graveyard is peaceful and small. It’s by the river. Big gates are closed but not locked. I asked did she want to be alone but no, this was a maintenance visit. Side by side we crouched down and plucked all the dead heads off the hyacinths growing over him. In another part of the graveyard an elderly man was drifting, carrying a candle in his hands. My friend looked surprised when he greeted her and told me afterwards, he had grown so thin she wouldn’t have known him.

May 3, 2013
a nighttime walk

It’s 11pm. Went for a bedtime walk around the road with my friend and host. Most of the houses are dark and in one or two windows are lights. Don’t other people’s houses entice when it is late and one longs for one’s bed.

A tree along the highway has burst into bloom. “I like the apples from that tree,” she says. In the next street three raw apartment blocks rest on torn earth, now rained in. A dark tree yields the faint squeak of some almost-sleeping bird. I tell her how I crouched by the river and watched a pair of ducks, colourful male & dun female, surf past with lolling expressions on their faces (or so it seemed); the current is rapid and swollen with snowmelt after the spring freeze. Five minutes later they passed again: looked like the same couple, still skating pleasurably. I thought they must have flown up to have another go. Yes, she says: they do that. I would too, I think, if I were feathered.

May 1, 2013
the river path

I ate my muesli on the river path and watched red insects furred with a fringe of legs investigating the slowly-rotting wood. The boatshed is held up by two felled but still rooted trees. The motorway roars a few hundred metres south, it carries a siren past. I saw a speedboat race upstream and then, twenty minutes later, return, in silence, with its engine cut: they were travelling sideways, simply letting the water bring them. As I watched, the man took his eyes off his wife’s hand on the tiller and folding his arms like a well-cared-for corpse he lay back full length in the bottom of the boat. The peace of people’s secret ambitions. After a long winter of empty skies the trees are full of song. Overnight I was reading Jonathan Franzen’s heartfelt but wry essays about the murder of migrating birds. I honour him. There should be many many more ducks and birds on this river, my friends say, at this time of year. What we have made very little resembles what I know of life. Sitting in a mossy hollow feeling a speckle of sun on my shoulders I realize I have taken refuge in the countryside and may never go back. Spend the rest of my life foraging round them and dwelling in the treetops like an airborne burrow: a nest ~ I imagine visiting cities like a honeybee to carry the gold dust away on my very many legs, darting in and droning away again, making a child’s drawing of a flower.

April 14, 2013
you want a peace of me

Tonight I intervened in somebody’s love mess and may well have made things worse. I had cycled through the lit tunnel under the bridge four times for the sheer joy and came out blinking into the stormy-seeming piled sky, alongside the frozen-over river. I heard a shout. A tall man was dragging his much smaller girlfriend by the collar of her coat, shaking her like a puppy, while she cowered and pled. It took a second with her face hidden and in the dark to ascertain this wasn’t mutual horseplay. Hey, I shouted, then really bellowed HEY! Leave her alone!

She was shrinking inside her clothes and he was a shrunken king, big in the body but small in the soul. Hey! I cried again, and he paused in his torment to shake a big fist at me. I don’t know what “You wanna piece of me?” sounds like in Danish, but then again, I think now I do. I was yelling to her, trying to speak slow and clear, praying all Danes understand English: Walk away! You, girl, please! Just walk away. Two other women huddled in the bus stop asked, what was going on. By now the fraught couple had retreated (first rule of evading attack: do not go where he leads you) behind a big tree and she was crouching on the ground like a servant, in her fur-lined parka, her supplicant head bent as he yelled down at her and she took it. After a while seeing he was being watched the coward started gentling and soothing, he crouched opposite and the young woman in the bus stop said, naively, It’s alright now.

We daren’t go any closer. Their stronger-minded friend walked past, I didn’t catch her name but the other two girls called out to her and she said, Well, we don’t know what kind of guy he is. I said, I think I know exactly what kind of guy he is. Well, she said, but if he has a gun – or a knife –

They must have called the police because the three of them climbed on their bus when it arrived and moments later a police officer with a piercing flashlight lept out of a car. He talked to the ‘man’ and his female colleague talked to the woman, who had her back turned from shame, and the upshot was the couple climbed into his big black SUV and roared away. We can do nothing, the policeman said, if she stays. People are grown-ups. Yes, I said; she has to want to walk away. Exchanged cards with the lovely-faced Persian guy who had climbed off his bicycle and he said, Next time you come to Copenhagen, you don’t have to stay in a hotel. Nonetheless… I think I will. I think of that girl, home with him now, cowering and pleading. May she find the strength that’s inside us all. May he. And stop your bullying.

March 1, 2013
tall & straight-sided

Tonight I saved somebody’s life. I cycled past a table on the mall where Scientologists were practising Scientology, just right out in the open as though it were nothing, were not based on shame & rooted in a foul, deliberate dismaying of the self. A beautiful, sumptuous, exquisite black woman sat paying attention and nodding as she was told wonders (presumably) that could be hers ~ the stance of her head & the slightly tall straight-sided hat she wore reminded me, at least, that she is an African queen. I cycled past. My heart roared in me. I swerved and slowed and circled round. When I went back to her she was still listening to this lanky dude in a red Scientology t-shirt. It seems to me funny that only McDonalds ~ almost endearingly ~ are not aware that the prefix ‘Mc’ does not denote corroboration (McFeast, McProfit, McCafe). He wore his Scientology t-shirt & she wore her splendid self & listened. I stopped beside them and waited for the courage. I’d a fear he might reach out some big butterfly net and trap me in glass forever. I leaned over to her over the neck of my bicycle. “This is a cult. And you are beautiful. And there is nothing the matter with you.” I know they start with personalty ‘testing’: presumably, everyone fails the test. The beautiful woman laughed; I spoke in English: she answered in German, “danke schoen”. Hearing me, I hoped; herself, I truly hope.

January 20, 2013
olivewood

On the market I bought a tiny chopping block made from olive wood. It’s dense and silky and only a little larger than my spread hand. I was about to hand over the money when he said, Some of the trees are 500 years old! How is that a selling point? My eyes filled with tears. 500 years? Yet someone’s hacked it down to chop onions on?

The guy explained. When the tree stops fruiting. They plant a new tree. So the old one. Has to go. A few stalls later I bought a bottle of cloudy oil pressed from some other olive tree. In a furniture store in Adelaide my friend and I found foldable patio settings carved out of ‘plantation teak.’ Teak too takes hundreds of years to mature. I remember how bleakly we marvelled at it: What prescient person realized, half a millenium back, that one day we would need stands of teak? Why is there not a statue to this innovative forester on every town square and in every school?

January 12, 2013
sex as a spectator sport

There are two sex shops nearby amid the shoes, discounted make up, flimsy summer dresses and cheap suits. Assuming they don’t sell sex itself any more than garage sales sell garages, I am guessing they sell implements. Outfits. Toys. Exciters & enhancers.

I’ve never been much interested in football. If someone turns up at my door with a ball, saying, Come down the park & let’s play – I’ll be there. But why watch other people doing it? Pornography seems to me strange like this. Sex is not a spectator sport. It happens between, and within. And the sex shops with their bristling array make me feel sad for their clients. If you need the Red Bull, the special lighting, the tools and the costume drama – if you are not overwhelmed by the breathing closeness of the one you want, standing before you in their naked body that has carried them here over worlds you will never know – it seems you are missing the point somehow. The reality. The experience.

How is it not unbearably moving, exciting, to take hold of someone you long for? Years ago in a trash magazine I read a confessional interview with an American rock teenager. His band is not up to much. But he fell in love with a famous girl, and had married her, and was boasting. He told how their first encounter took place in a famous hotel – o! the fame! the fame! the glory! – and in that hotel the bedroom had a long mirror behind the big bed. He said, I was pinching myself, I was saying, man, you’re balling Actress X! And you’re watching it in real time!!

September 24, 2010