In my dream I was in this amazing cafe taking five floors of an abandoned building in Brisbane. Right at the top was a little terrace looking out only on treetops. There was a waitress dressed up in a robot suit she could not see out of which blinded her from doing her work, she struggled cutely from table to table and her colleagues were laughing gamely but I thought: how annoying. A boy who wanted to move to Scotland the next day & was saying farewell said to me, that is the thing about Brisbane! just when you leave something incredible opens up in the trees. Then I was talking with this man who lived on a remote island where he showed me how to find my way to his camp and said, this is where the olds are doing a lot of planning to take their Country back. Then he came in to wake me up pulling up the dense shutters and the sound of the dog snuffling and squeaking outside the door and it is time we went to the markets, we direly need vegetables and the birds are teeming life is like a dream, only people have chilly creaking jackets and their hug is cold because they have been sitting outside scented with coffee and the wind is icy although the sun is warm.
Tag: countryside
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frauenpower
Tiny revolutions in other people’s lives, I just can’t stop making them. When we got here and had eaten our first meal together I said to our hostess, No, I’ll wash up. Because as everybody knows, it’s not on for the person who cooks to wash up as well. I made sure to say it loudly and clearly in front of her husband and all her grown children, but got mere glassy looks in exchange. “Cathoel is very industrious,” she noted, approvingly, later, to her son. Christmas morning I made the only grandchild thank her after she’d been brought a cup of cocoa when everyone else was drinking coffee. She decided she’d like some once her grandmother had already sat down, and without hesitation the grandmother left her own breakfast untouched and got up again.
I couldn’t bear to see how everybody sat down at the long, laden table and started saying, “Some jam would be nice,” and then when she had already returned from fetching it, “Oh, you know what? Let’s have some dark bread as well.” Tonight my partner cooked and I washed up. Afterwards we played cards, just him and his mum and his dad and me. The father got up and got beers. As I got up to go to the kettle I announced, “And I’ll take a cup of tea… does anybody else want a cup of tea?” With slight embarrassment my partner corrected my German: “No, Cathoel, in this case you say ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea.’ ‘I’ll take a cup of tea’ is for when you’re expecting a waitress to bring it to you.” “Yes,” I said, primly, “I was making a joke. Because I’ve noticed in this household people just sit there and say, I’ll take a cup of tea, and then your mother instantly gets up and goes into the kitchen.” His mother began to laugh. I’ve never seen her laugh so heartily. She slapped herself across the knees. “Thank you! Thank you!” Her cards spilled and she picked them up and began tucking them back into a handful, wiping away tears. We played on and I drank my tea and they drank their giant beers, and in the end it turned out the two men had trailed behind and the winners, bringing home exactly the same number of points each, were the two of us. “Sieg der Frauen!” I said, victory of the women. “Frauenpower,” she said, and we shook hands diagonally across the table.
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dinner party from the sofa
I was at a dinner party and came over all poorly. In fact I thought I might throw up and had to kind of bolt from the room. Must’ve been the Tramadol, an opiate fed to me by my beloved who had acquired it from his father, who suffers from extreme chronic pain. “They’re not really all that strong,” his father said airily. The headache that has been a companion for days now, for almost a week, had sharpened so if I turned my head it brought spasms of nausea. A small disagreement over breakfast had unexpectedly ballooned into a stand-up shouting match in this house where I am a new guest, pain in my belly from the sorrow of it all day. So I succumbed. “Take the other half, too,” he said when the pain did not ebb. Twenty minutes later we were at this party on the other side of the little winding road where the family live scattered in houses like little farms and I started to feel most peculiar. You know that dizzy sweating pressure that comes with acute nausea. Anyway I sat it out and everyone was kind and generous, including the two people who’d yelled at me. What I wanted to say was that the feeling of lying under a soft scarlet blanket on the long sofa in the living room, with a paper Christmas star beaming down on me and a row of red candles in the casement unlit, was so cosy and comforting I felt a whole mess of worries and griefs slowly melt and slide away. The heating was not on in this other room and the chill in the air felt to me healthy and fresh, deeply deeply invigorating. The sounds of communion and chatter from next door were so soothing and a delight. Over the adult voices and faint music I could hear the joyous prinkling of the little girl who was drifting in her seabed of uterine privacy when we were last here, who is thoughtful and nachdenklich, reflective, and has hair the colour of threshed wheat. They brought me a heat pack for my neck, they saved me some dessert. When we came out after our hugs the stars were so clear and so high and the sky had opened itself to the night, the heavens upon us, the peaked white houses standing about like sleeping horses, the night seemed to me sacred and blessed and the row of long needling trees threading the sky along the winding road into the distance led, one could tell, into all good, mysterious things. The white dog made a flickering song of joy along the slick black road as we wound our way home, breathing visibly.
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duck surfer
Watching an adolescent duck flying upstream and surfing down, flying up and surfing down, over and over on the fast-moving river. Finally he hauls himself out on a low-hanging branch and sits there, drying in the sun, quacking with satisfaction.
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they don’t speak
Switzerland: land of milk can honey. I am back and the milk from the Bioladen is fresh and sweet and creamy. Honey-coloured cattle browse along the path flicking fat mosquitoes with paint-brush tails. It’s all pretty: even the oversized Lego industrial landscapes. Life is orderly and a little prim. A church on every hillside: Catholic and Protestant (they don’t speak). The building of minarets on mosques is now forbidden here, it contravenes the Constitution. The snarling sprawl of Berlin overgrown between upright German houses, climate chaos and poverty seem very far from shore.
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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.
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sailor way
By the river new wildflowers are now growing, the seasons progress with colour and line. Some of them are upright prongs of dark pink clovers and some, I suspect from the shape, might be buttercups. Buttercups are famous! I’ve read about them since I was a little girl, in English novels. But I think I’ve never seen one. Let alone the swards of white spear-flowers populating the nearby woods, which travel in a carpet as far as the eye can discern under trees…. On the river a lady duck surfs as lady ducks did on the swift green current with their husbands, three weeks ago. This one has babies aboard. They clutter her back, five dark brown bobbing heads, and she carries them smoothly and the water carries all of them, as time carries all of us, long may it be so if our enterprises and selfishness have not too deeply uncluttered the lifeless oceans and cluttered up the air and clogged with metals the water. Sail away, duck mum, smooth like a promise and find a better, greener place.
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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.
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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.
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quiet heart
When I walk between the quiet cottages and see people with their heads bowed, eating dinner… I can feel the wildness in my heart and I feel like a teenager, it feels like rage.
