Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: gorgeous

  • just entwined

    just entwined

    Found this unbelievable stationery store. It is vast and old-fashioned, everything neatly arranged. They had blocks of yellow writing paper, stacked in rows, some with no margin, some with a narrow margin, some with an extra-wide margin for some specialized purpose. They had gleaming jars of bulldog clips, silver ones, brass ones: pretty. They had all different kinds of string: hemp twine, sturdy and wrapped in a round ball the size of a baby’s head; and mean-looking black-and-white flecks, thin and strong; and a dreamy colourful cotton twine which came on a long tall spool and which I held in my hand for five minutes, warming it. Like an egg. They had a whole shelf of little cardboard boxes, the kind pastels and charcoal come in, held together on the corners by neatly folded staples. They had Moleskines designed by people who use Moleskines: the covers printed with one guy’s harbourside sketch of Hong Kong in pen and ink, another woman’s purling abstract with falling petals. They had slabs of plywood for balancing your painting on your easel and aisles thinly populated with drifters, holding up articles and musing on them, some of them wearing a kind of half-smile or fierce frown of concentration that seemed to me to indicate they were dreaming up what they would make with all these products.

    This was in Copenhagen, which I visited at the age of 10 and again two months ago, and where if it didn’t cost twenty Kroner every second just to breathe, I would move tomorrow, and learn to play better piano and be a better jazz composer. In the teetering, cobbled old town I found five jazz clubs within a square kilometre; most of them filled to the gills; and the audiences ranged from age 20 to 70. What a lovely town. Cold and windy. But beautiful. And peaceful in the water.

    h20 HoL cobbles puddle copper

  • a-biscuit, a-basket

    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.

    H2O HoL golden window aslant

  • a thousand species of money, each bigger-eyed than the last

    a thousand species of money, each bigger-eyed than the last

    I have a cute, European friend who talks about money in the slang sense as “bugs.” This cost 75 bugs and the other was a steal at only 20 bugs. To talk about bucks of course makes no more sense: why would a male deer have more value than a bear, a bitch, a bison? I never correct my friend because every time I hear “this cost me almost fifty bugs” it makes me so happy.

    H2O HoL winterbound apfelherz

  • the river path

    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.

    H2O HoL delicious graffiti tree

  • a last-minute shimmy of the hips

    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.

    H2O HoL lisbon colours

  • these teachers

    these teachers

    Went to a museum of ornate Islamic art and have finally learned the difference between Sunni and Shia. They began wrangling as soon as Muhammed was dead. Sunni say, the head of the church should be elected. Shi’ites say, it must be a direct descendent of Mohammed. Meantime the streets are quiet as people close their offices to commemorate the death of another teacher who was murdered 2000 years ago. These men and their legacies. In a lunchtime cafe, the only place open, a guy shrugging into his puffer jacket kicks the leg of my table and rights himself without even making eye contact. Whatever I have learned, I have learned from the sun on my closed lids as well as from daughters as well as from sons. I’ve tried to read the tea slops that spill into the rim of my saucer. I’ve tried to breathe before speaking. I feel alone & connected to everything. My heart is ornate and blue like a lake, like a cracked china bowl dug out of an old grave.

    H2O HoL Spree Mosque Blick

  • cradle of many things

    cradle of many things

    Cycling home under a high full moon through a dark city so cold it’s as though the streets stand motionless under water. Northern Europe, cradle of so many things, including me. The buildings stand serene on street corners, unafraid of waiting. Traffic sporadic, roads wide and smooth, trees utterly leafless with branches standing separate and bare against the sky but, if I were to reach up and drag one down, already the infestation of buds and bugs that’s Spring.

    H2O HoL leafy smear windscreens

  • allure

    allure

    Went out early, the sun through my window a lure. My favourite chic but drowsy wine bar cafe was playing Billie Holiday. Unusually it was filled up today with dishevelled, sleep-drowned people. A shovel-load. I was one of them. We sat in a row sipping & pecking at our breakfasts like a mess of half-fledged birds.

    h2o swedish cafe

  • everything soft, and white, and powdery

    everything soft, and white, and powdery

    Tramping through the fresh snow, everything soft and white and powdery. Like daylight the snow lies unequivocally on everything. Six bursting, screeching, whumphing shapes pass overhead like white explosions and resolve themselves, by a process of frantic backpedalling, into swans. As they land on the water they one by one become graceful and fleet. I smile at the tall man opposite, who stops. “I know you! I know your face.” “Well, I don’t think so, I’m Australian, I’ve only been here a few months.” “But I know your face! Pretty face, you’ve got. Can I take it?” He holds up a camera with a large, open lens. “What for?” I say. “Nicht zum verkaufen,” he assures me (not for selling), “just because I’d like to.” He shows me the picture, my kilos of red scarf and ridiculous beanie. Around us the world is white and a golden dog plunges through the fresh snowdrifts, spluttering. The swans have forgotten their panic and sail like perfection under the very old, arched green stone bridge.

    H2O HoL everything white and fresh

  • through snow

    through snow

    a bell dings behind me, I step aside and watch the beautiful line of a bicycle’s tyres, drawing like dark pencil on white paper through the snow

    H2O HoL bicycle thru white snow