Sometimes at night I like to talk to myself
in the dark, on the way home, on my bike
and then Berlin you drive me crazy with desire
for you, the trees which flicker over my back
like beetles’ wings, going light and dark, light
and heavy, all three at once
Tag: bicycle
-
light at night ja
-
of wheels & wings
Today a day of wheels and wings. On the high street I set myself an errand, which failed, as the Turkish woman who repairs garments has locked her shop and flown south for the summer, into a tide of incoming birds. Her storefront was locked like a little dark cage. On the street out front two big bikes sputtered and racked, their owners shouting conversation back and forth as they waited for the light to change.
Who among us is not waiting on a change in the light? A small boy, not too small, maybe eight or nine, was making his way down the pavement. He stopped and gazed at these beasts, two big throbbing machines, the riders almost supine in that cock-cocking slouch. Spine relaxed to a slump, pelvis tilt: this was manhood. These were Harleys, or whatever other bike there is that renders that cocooned helplessness. Hands up curved like a child riding papa’s back and peering over. The boy made a thumbs-up and grinned. They didn’t see him. I was walking behind and swept up my own arm to jab downwards. Look, I showed them, swooping the air above his head like a homie. This boy here, needing your manhood. The nearer one saw him and smiled, cracking a face almost paisleyed in swirling tattoos. The boy called out something. Made a fresh thumbs-up and offered it. “Was?” the biker yelled: whut? I left them talking – masculine, back and forth across a several arms-length’s distance, in roars, through the machinery of their own engine noise – I was grinning. They seemed to me all somehow boyish, and sweet.
Very late alone I had lunch under the trees. The water beckoned with deceitful gleams, fish-whiffy at close-up. Every passing car was loud on the cobbles, which make tyres sound flabby as though hopelessly flat. On the pavement a woman passed wheeling a bicycle, sailing under steam, under her own steam. Her long brown hair tangling behind her. A small, queenly child perched on the bicycle seat. The child had clots of molasses-coloured dreads in a long ponytail; she rode her mother’s bicycle as though it were a steed, her beauty an admonition on us all. The sister came pedalling behind, dreaming atop her own bike as her little feet propelled it forward slowly. The slow, stately pace and their undisplaying femininity gave the family a processional quality.
Overhead, the summer trees flickered. In three months all these trees will be bare, I suppose. Late at night I’ve been out walking and heard the trees start up the breezes as though it were old spirits of the place who pass. The breeze travels high off the ground, in the canopy. The branches rustle and are silent again, shifting the dark. In the old world, I have heard, people knew how to make news travel from tree to tree. We have forgotten our every enchantment. I think we seem to long for that. The flickering fireside of a computer or gather-round television. The mercury of incessant palm-warming phones, that promised to free us and have enslaved. As I was frowning across the road into this thought, a fellow rode past on his ridiculous bicycle, wearing a tiny porkpie hat. His bike had tiny wheels and a tiny frame. Pedalling like a clown, his knees under his chin, he too stared ferociously ahead. But he looked up and caught my eye and slowly, piercingly sweetly smiled, and I smiled back and thought: this changes everything.
On the tabletop a glossy orange ladybird made its way trundlingly by. Ladybird, here: let me give you a lift, I thought, deceitfully, meaning here ladybird… give me a lift. I put out my finger flat to her, hoping she would launch herself off me and fly away so I could launch on her a wish. She climbed me and kept climbing, clear along my finger and up onto the back of the hand. Scaling the knobbly writer bones on my wrist she came up softly through the hairs on my speckled forearm. Softly, softly, all the way to the shoulder she came. I put up my hand, patting: Where have you gone. She fell out of my hair, locked in the jaws of a ferocious millipede. He was black, glossy, and writhing, he had her pegged by the petticoat of her wings. As I said aloud, Oh, no! and began to try and separate them I was aware of a prejudiced loyalty, stemming not just from the delicate, brief intimacy shared with the beetle but also her cute, round prettiness, from a human-projecting point of view. He was hungry too but I had no thought for him: even the pronouns I assigned seemed to me a kind of self-adoration disguised as compassion. It seemed like he was consuming her in front of my eyes. I put my thumbnail in between them. That’s how he died, because I accidentally separated his head from his body, a much larger brute, crude and intrusive. His body curled and stilled. The bird hobbled away, her skirts awry. The glossy orange wing case folded neatly and defensively whole but one sheer inner wing trailed long and ruffled behind her. I suppose this creature now will starve and will die a painful death, where she might have been eaten at once. I got up and walked home through the jolting stream of pedestrian-sized traffic, the bike trailers towing kids home from kindergarten, children loose and relaxed in their own inner worlds, gazing, musing, one little boy holding a flapping cut-out drawing in front of his face and singing sleepily as in a dream. I craved their size and their sense of safety. I envied their wheels and their wings.
-
colourful, gleaming, a fresh crate of stairwell
I walked home at last through the markets and by the time I got to the street door of my new home I was struggling with parcels, camera because things kept flinging themselves at me in their peculiar beauty and a heavy bag of books from the discount box outside a wonderful bookshop I’ve wanted to step into for ages, and I had. At the door I met this man who was one of those so beautifully made, sculpted, just beautiful men built like manhood, his arms bare and brown and his black hair well cut but not obsessively groomed and his shoulders taut as he held at chest height a wooden crate of market vegetables, colourful, gleaming. You know how your breath kind of stops. He reached over me as I leaned my bicycle and fumbled the key and just – pushed – the heavy Haustür open for me, slid past, stood at ease with his lovely boot blocking the door from slamming on me. I said thank you and cambumbled myself and bike and packages inside. At the stairwell we bottlenecked and he was behind me as I hoisted up the bike and looped my book bag over one arm and climbed the wide stairs, measuring the treads with his comfortable, go for miles fit and perfect pace. I knew that he had seen my awkwardness and would be used to it and would take it as his tribute. As we both turned at the landing, me and my bicycle with him and his fruit behind me, he said, “Schönes Rad!” Lovely bicycle. Mine is on the first floor and by the time I’d worked out what he’d said (“He spoke to me!”) we were at my door. The suggestiveness of doorways flickered through my mind as rapidly as a fish and I fumbled my key and said, “Ja. Stimmt.” Yes: true. And he smiled and I smiled and he went on up the stairs and knocked at my upstairs neighbours and beauty is an accursed gift, I remember the luminous days of my own moon when people would stop me or cross the street to tell me what they had noticed about my body, my face. Your hair, your feet, the way your hand pushes back the door: inside this world of collapsed longings which fan out into every promenade and every boulevard you enter and entice and somehow enlist people, the whole world, in your sharedness, even when you are not thinking of it and when you are mournful or hurrying or bored: that is the fanfare beauty gives to our everyday, like a flag streaming across the peerless sky that gives weight to its innocent unmeaning blue and makes it for a moment everything and perfect.
-
the pickling palace
The people across the road are drunk and two of them are planning to have sex together tonight for the first time. That’s at this stage, it’s not even dark yet, we’ve still got the Fight that Blows Up Out of Nowhere and Falling Asleep in the Pizza up our sleeves. Their voices carry and then the Friday afternoon traffic will surge up the hill again to carry them away. He says something and she says, “You are fucking kidding me.” “No,” he says, something something. “You’re just making that up!” Her incredulity is a dare. Climb this tree for me and bring that fruit. He says, “No, I’m deadset serious. Anything you like.” One of the other blokes says something and then the girl begins to sing, or chant, like she was at a football game: “Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus, Je-sus.” The positive guy sings something over the top of her, harmonizing. He’s making it up. He’s fucking-kidding her. Their verandah falls apart in a seething heap of laughs just as a truck roars down the road. When the noise clears he is saying, aggrieved, “…been doing it all my life.” I know that feeling, I have too. I have just got home from a delicate day of negotiations in my unconscious and as we swept over the bridge with its hanging-lantern streetlights and banners I felt a song unbrew in me. I sang it out the window in handfuls of confetti and as we pulled away from under the biggest fig tree, that the road goes around (the greatest kind of road), I said, to my long-legged companion who was driving, “Did you see that girl on the corner, the beautiful girl, with the guy who’s just so in love with her?” “Yes,” he said, his voice warm as if fond of them. “How she was just standing there in her little purple dress,” I said, “holding the orange flowers he brought her. He’s looking at her so carefully, he’s in love with her every little gesture. She’s not even noticing, telling him something, he’s in love with the way that she says it.” “So is she in love?” he wanted to know. I said, “Could be. But she’s not thinking about it, she is remembering something that happened and telling him. So it was hard to tell.”
We drove round a sweeping corner prickly with pedestrians. We had watched a giant ibis as it took off from a street sign and flew the length of Charlotte Street, its white wings insignia. The prosperous tropical colonialism and sandstone and big bunches of trees made me feel at home. I wound my seat back and propped my foot out the side window. I said, sentimentally, “Both of them standing there with their bicycles.”
-
bicycling on
Finally my bike! There have been various substitute treadlies in between but my own blue bike, bought in Alice Springs a decade back, is now out of storage and dusted and greased and today for the first time we hit the black road. Wahoo! The freedom and terror. Raced down the tumult of traffic to a sleepy golden markets, where under the trees people had laid out vegetables, sprouting herbs, tempting red circles of handmade saucisson. After a coffee and waxy croissant we sauntered out as the stallholders packed up. One was a big bloke with black beard and a huge smile who stopped packing, and straightened, when I said, “Can I take a photo of your red stuff and the red stuff behind? Would that bother you?”
He grinned. He looked at the bunch of marigolds and bouquet of red rubber gloves and turned to see that behind him, now that the intervening stalls had folded away, the scarlet florals of a fashion stall made another layer of colour. “The red stuff, and the red stuff behind,” he said. “Spoken like a true photographer.”
I was rummaging in my bag. “Yeah the professional terminology, eh?” I made a dozen photographs with people swiping by obligingly as my coloured-cotton, human scenery. Showed him the last and most successful shot. We wished each other a good week with enormous cordiality and I had the feeling we both would have liked to have given up a hug. On the narrow, shaded road outside the markets I wobbled and nearly fell as a car overtook me within an arm’s length. He accelerated to pass me, even though the standing traffic was banked at the traffic lights metres ahead. When he stopped I swooped round onto his driver’s side and stopped, and spoke to the guy through his unwound window. “Excuse me, Sir. There’s a new law, you have to stay a metre and a half away from the nearest bike, because it’s much safer. Thanks!” And I patted his windowsill familiarly, patronisingly, and pedalled off. It feels good to be back on the bike. But it wouldn’t feel good to be forever extinguished and flattened like a pizza on asphalt because some guy with “fat eggs” as they call it in German wanted to prove he could escape my hand-built speed.
-
lord snowdon’s bicycle
Rounding the corner on my bike just now I accidentally took part in a mass demonstration. I don’t know what it was about, maybe just a celebration of biking. People seemed easy and relaxed, it is a sweet sunny day with high white cloud, a blue sky, the pack of people travelling at jogging pace over the bridge, guarded by police on massive motorbikes, reminded me of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s description of her father’s experience of riding up out of the river bluffs with a big wolf pack travelling on all sides, they must have just killed and eaten, he told her, they showed no interest in me whatsoever. This was a quiet deed: shared, fruity, holy; some cyclists had dressed up, about a third were wearing helmets, but most of us travelled incognito, as our regular selves, quiet chat here and there like flowers in the grass or fishes occasionally leaping from the water. At my street corner I peeled off and passed the flower stall that has suddenly appeared since the weather turned autumnal, the strands of cut purple grasses stirring their flimmish pretty seedheads in the breeze like a prairie. America once was all prairie. A body of buffalo roamed it from end to end, turning each time they eventually reached the coast, nosing each other, “it’s not here! go back!” like the sparkling water in a snowdome slapping from end to end slowly. This may not be the exact scientific truth.
-
tufty
Under the trees I saw two people riding side by side, holding hands between the bicycles. Not far away a duck plunged earnestly beak-first into the water, its tufted tail and downy bum held upright by the twin prongs of its feet on the scummy surface.
-
by the nape
A man just jogged down the stairs holding his bicycle, by the nape of its seat, with one hand. In his other hand casually he carried a satchel spilling books. Its wheels are spinning helplessly: in the fluttering pit of my stomach I know the feeling.
-
in kindly whispers
Long night ride home between the trees, the trees, the trees. They are dark and tall and reach down into the night, yearning away wild from the centre of the earth its boiling core. They are reaching the night down for us on earth, in whispers, like kindly adults explaining something magical to children.
My bicycle is silent and has no lights.
You know that high still cloud at night that seems creamy and shattered like when someone, really stoned, showed you how custard powder is the only substance on earth that can be stirred, when mixed up thick enough in a bowl of water, and at the same time shattered at a blow from the back of a spoon. A liquid, a solid. Like glass. That was last century and in a different hemisphere but, yes, Gus, I still remember it.
-
feeding the swains
Yesterday I saw two people having a very cute picnic in a park. They were sitting side by side on one of the benches facing in to the path and had a card table set up with checkered blue and white tablecloth, two glasses, an open bottle, bowls of nibblies, real napkins… the whole nine yards. Which is about how many Brisbane backyards would have fit in this skimpy narrow green strip that provided space for a few lovely trees to grow between the six-storey apartment houses. The picnickers were in their fifties and looked to have dressed for the occasion, she had on make up and sparkly earrings and he had on his good jeans. They looked so happy. They saluted me with raised glasses when I smiled at them. Ten minutes earlier I’d passed a man feeding a swan, by the river, he sat cross-legged on a large tree stump with his own glass of wine, paper parcel of food, and the swan bent its elegant neck to fetch things from his hand. First sunny day in a while and the greensward was littered with revellers – revellers and their bicycles – room enough to sit but not to lie down. Plenty of swans foraging the riverbank in hopes of crumbs and morsels. My German-speaking friend calls them ‘swains.’
