I showed up at the supermarket checkout at closing time with a tub of ice cream. She said, “How are we this evening,” and I said, “Well, I can’t speak for you, but I’m fine!” I gave her such a big smile she took a blink and stepped backwards. But she was game, we’re human, they could put big windows up high in those places to let the trapped staff gaze out. Rewards card? Nope. Bag? I opened my little folding one with a whoosh. “I’m in the supermarket, in my pyjamas, buying ice cream,” I rejoiced. “This is a beautiful night in my life.” She laughed. She folded up my receipt over and over into a very neat square then pushed it inside the bag. We wished each other a great evening. All the way home I was peering up through the windscreen following the shrouded moon. Brisbane, you have so very many trees. So many friendly young women who are competent and under employed. So many tubs of fine ice cream.
Tag: moon
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moon over Accra
It’s a beautiful night in Ghana and the moon is very full. Immodestly so. What need has a moon of modesty? She has already pledged her love. “I will follow you though it turn me in circles all the rest of my rocky dry days.”
I am sitting nursing a less and less cold beer at a local spot, at the junction. In Accra. These eight days I have sampled four of Ghana’s beers and I like this one. It has bitter local herbs and I am drinking it with a little sack of ripe plantain chips. I went back over to the lady nursing her child who bakes eight different kinds of chips and sets them out in little crisp cellulose bags. When I reached for the plantain chips she said, “Have you tried this one? It is ripe plantain. It’s better.”
My first morning we went strolling through the hot dusty streets and, in my case, the jet lag, and found a lady selling mangoes from a bowl, who sliced me one, and a lady selling fat ripe bananas, and a woman with a tiny stall roofed in tarpaulin who fried up rice and beans with a headless fish and a curling slab of beef skin. She served it wrapped in a banana leaf and then two plastic bags. The beef skin quivered, nearly transparent, and I stared at it a long time before putting the corner very gingerly in my mouth. Oh, no.
Jet lag is gone now and I am subsiding into this beautiful world. The moon is squared between four overhead wires and I gaze up, rustling the crisp cellulose bag with my fingertips, thinking of nothing at all. A man drawing a cart behind him heaped with yams stops to talk across the narrow garden bed to the spot’s owner. “How come you never buy my yams anymore? You buying from the other guys?”
“No,” he says, “I will buy them soon.” I have watched this man, so relaxed under his awning of pink and white bougainvillea, tending his garden with a pointed stick to loosen the soil and a jar of tap water. The yam vendor creaks on and a man I don’t know, as I know nobody in Ghana, comes over the road and joins his friends. He says, “Good evening, madame. How are you.”
“Good evening, sir. Thank you, I am well. How are you?”
And he says, “You are feeling at home.”
I raise my hand. I let it drop with its palm up and open. “It’s so beautiful here. I’m so happy. Your wonderful city.”
Can one fall in love with an entire country? This one has.
I came here on my second evening when the object of my visit was at work. I drank a cold beer and tried out the plantain chips. The owner of the little beer terrace invited me to share his table. Another man was sitting between us and he began drumming on the table’s edge, a rapid, complex rhythm, with his two stiffened fingers as though they were blades. I said, “Are you a musician?”
And he said, “I hope so. I’ve got a couple of albums out.”
Such a creative, thriving, diving, cormorant city. And so noisy. Wherever I go it is to a concert of honks and toots as every passing cab driver tries his luck. I joined Uber, with some nervousness, never having used it before, and was offered lifts in immaculate cars by drivers named Ernest, Ebenezer, Divine, Lord, Sumaila, and Wallestine. I spoke to a man on the street whose t shirt said LOVE and the O was the shape of Africa. “I love your t shirt.” “Where are you from?” And as we got talking he offered,
“Let me give you my phone number. We just live in that house over there, the blue gate behind the plantain palms. If you need anything, or if you ever get in trouble or need help: you can call me.”
This genteel, educated culture. This overwhelming sense that I am walking amongst gods. The tall, fit, gracious, courteously and warmly smiling people. Their patience and kindness. The sense that I’ve been right all along, and in our spoilt countries we have forgotten how to live. That these people in their exploited country are holding out something we are too miserable to grasp. Racism is envy. I have always known it and now I see it everywhere.
The night passed serenely around us and I finished my beer and got up. My drummer acquaintance was at the next table. “What were you writing? A poem?”
“Oh,” I said, touching my bag self consciously. “I was just writing about the moon.”
He tipped his head back. “I hadn’t noticed it.”
“Powerful moon, tonight.”
“Eh,” he said, “Yes: it is full.”
And I said, “Yes, and the crimes of passion and incidents of insanity are spiking tonight all round the world. The moon controls whole oceans. What are we but little seas? Sloshing with seawater.”
“Seawater?”
“Well,” I said, “salt water. We are mostly salt water. So the moon.”
This is black Africa. The night treads endlessly on the sky. The lighted shop fronts with their sagging awnings and the smoke from the goat gizzard stall and the woman walking by with her fleet of buckets on her head are a world I have not met before and always, always longed for. As we stood there, a young man shot past on his bicycle, dressed all in white. A man carrying on his head a stack of neatly folded bright batiks walked by. “I am waiting for the pineapple woman,” my friend said. “I want pineapple.” Don’t we all. The heaps of fresh fruit, the dried fish, the bright plastic buckets. I have stepped off the planet of Europe and I may be gone some time.
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favourite moon
It’s a moonlit night and I am with my favourite person. I am lying on his chest. He lies propped up against the head of his bed whence I propelled him via my exhaustion and desire to be held. Over the water the moon is risen, sweet and fair. Stately and true as silver steel. Our moon: not owned by any of us. The one my father sees as he gazes over his verandah railing, the one that follows the train, the one that seems tugged or drawn through the sky when we travel as if it were a giant helium balloon tied to our exhaust pipe. I was cycling home from an interesting gathering and the pale blue light quelled me and calmed my excited heart, all of a sudden exhaustion rose like a dew and I turned my handlebars irresistibly as a horse finding out her own home stable; he was home, he’d only just got home, I rang the bell and his dear voice sounded so pleased when he said: Oh! hi! Then I rode the elevator with its mirror up to the sixth floor and that’s how we wound up here. I’m so pleased. I know I am his favourite too. The scratching of his denim and mine and the rough wool of his jumper stir faintly to my ear. White light is streaming in through the window and the moon outside gazes benignly on all of us, far from home and choosing absolutely no favourites.
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super moon to the rescue
A knock at the door when we finally trudge home, carrying our groceries, exhausted. It’s the darlingest neighbour in the world. “Oh, hi!” “Hey Cathoel. Just wanted you to see the last supermoon.” I have gasped and clapped my hand to my mouth. “Oh my god!” He is telling me, “It was even better last night. But,” confidingly, “it’s pretty good tonight.” I am still gazing at the moon. “Fuck!” I say without meaning to. It has just sailed up coolly from behind a giant building. It has the sky to itself, apart from a few pilot fish like lesser boats milling round the giant sleek swans at the start of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race. My neighbour tells me shyly, “I love the moon.” He is wearing ugg boots and a pair of work shorts. It felt like summer today, suddenly, but it grew chill as it grew dark. When we set off to the shops an hour ago I had to laugh: partner in his ugg boots, me still stubbornly wearing sandals. “The pessimist and the optimist set out on a shopping trip together,” I told him, to make him laugh too.
At the supermarket we saw a display of premature mince pies. They were packaged in festive red and green with silver holly. September, October, November, December. I spoke to a man with a trolley full of plastic bags about whether he might ever think of bringing his own. A look of weariness passed over his face. He explained what I couldn’t know: They use them again. His particular household – the boy gaping silently from behind the flowering trolley – has special exemption. Circumstances. Babies. “We have a baby at home who uses disposable nappies.” I felt the sinking in my heart, could say nothing. He said, kindly, shifting into higher-pitched Real Estate Voice, “Thank you for your concern. I’m sure it’s helping.” You see, it’s different for me. I am selfish. I am lazy. I got my own reasons. We got a baby at home using disposable nappies. God knows you could never wrap those in, say, newspaper. I was blinking back tears and had to run outside to collect myself. When a pair of ugg boots appeared inside my line of vision I looked up. He was blinking, smiling, holding out his hand weighted down with the shopping sack rendered from old cement bags. We walked home and took refuge in our house and then the neighbour winkled me out and now the suberbmoon glides up this grey concrete sky as though drawn on an invisible string. It is blond and impervious to smaller, humbler craft, like the frantically blinking jet plane cruising low toward the harbour. It is better than anything you’ve ever seen. It just is. If you’re alive right now, run outside and look up.
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that lamp
I have a lamp that is shaped like a shell, was in fact a shell, is a home for a strange and retiring sea creature long now gone. It glows almost red when you plug in the bulb, a beloved’s ear with light behind it. Lately as the days are tropical cold and dim and windy we light the lamps tagsüber. Near the beer factory is a tiny art printer who lays on canvas and on fine rag paper people’s photographs and paintings. We left the lamp on at home and went out. He showed me some of his work. He opened a drawer and let me roll some of the beautiful paper in my hands.
Nearby is a tucked-in kind of cafe which you can barely see from the road, it is screened. Inside is like a secret fish tank. The chalkboard says You like cake. We make cake. Cake CAKE. We ordered cake. “Eighteen fifty,” said the guy. Cake is expensive. I said, “Now that was a very good year.” “Huh,” he said. We sat down and went over the book I am bringing to print this week: page after page of it, is it still beautiful, does it still hold. You’re looking for the tiny cracks and nail holes that let seep gradually the water. At the far end of the place a handsome man lay back in his chair. Stroking lazily his little device. He didn’t lift his eyes off it. His daughter dressed from head to toe in pink ballerina costume lay in a pile on the concrete playing dreamily with blocks they have stacked down there, singing and rousing on herself. She was in her own world, he was in someone else’s. Two men came into the cafe and I heard the guy recycling my pale joke. “19.90,” he said, “now there’s a good year. You’d be finished school, out into the world…” Behind my back I could almost hear them gazing at him blankly. I felt bad about the failure of the wordplay I’d transmitted, as though I had set him up.
Later the night turned out fresh and enchanted, so strange, those nights that bring home the spirits from the deep sea and the mountainside. I lay in the hammock between two large trees, watching as the wind rustled and tumbled like cities through surf, down to the bony ground again and again, carrying in itself everything whole and real, everything breathing. This month I don’t know if you’ve noticed but again the full moon was full or albert full for days and days. This always feels like some kind of special benediction to me, as though we have been given a treat, like we have pulled off a trick somehow and gotten away with something.
I should end there but there is something more to say. You know the night? In the night if you lie in a hammock you are in the air, you’re in the water. I gazed up, mostly with my eyes closed, into the depths of the tree, the sparring webwork of the lazing bed, the night itself drawing its fleece across the stars. It felt like one of those nights you could climb up into, curled as I lay curled, and the night would heal itself round you seamlessly and simply carry you away.
When I came in my partner called me over to his screen. He loves the new. He wanted to play me a piece of music, piano music. We were silent, listening to the climbing sounds. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Yes, I said, it’s beautiful. He said, “It’s the first piece of music not composed by human~” “What?” I stood up. I think I was shouting. “Why did you play me this? Why did you?” “What’s the matter?” “Why do you show me this stuff?” “I thought it would make you feel good! It’s not scary, it’s just beautiful. Listen how lovely that is.” When someone who understands doesn’t understand: the world is a cyborg desert already. I said, “I can’t take it. I can’t live in a world where machines compose music. I can’t live.” An ache spread inside my chest, despair, hopelessness, rage. Within me I felt the impaired moon, the night, the thoughts of serene pursuit drain like soap scum away. Poke the pearls and they are merely bubbles, evaporating, the >plink<. Someone let the plug out of the sky and I felt all the buoyancy of things drag slowly down, my heart is hot and sore and sleep seems more oblivion than restorative hammock in a sea of quiet leaves which sparkle like near stars.
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this most severe moon & I
A house nearby is small, wooden, and humble, a tiny workers’ cottage in the classic Queensland style. Only it’s been done up like an Ascot knot with a formal grey-and-dark-grey paint job, art-gallery landscaping (blades), and an unpleasant extension bigger and taller than the house that clamps onto its back side like some shuttered and illegal petrol station. It looks like a small, private jail for teenagers. It occurs to me that is perhaps what it is: the parents maybe have built this for their kids who were too big to leave sprawling round the living room and too small in the eyes of the world to take their chances under a beckoning dancing and quite shameless moon. As with beads, as with knucklebones, as with tealeaves: who can tell.
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she-moon
Can there be anything more magnificent than clouds passing, at night between us and the stars, unhurriedly and without pause passing from east to west like the sun. In the distant western hills a community of storm birds screeches and wheedles and spools and yearns. The visitor I brought back with me from Europe had never seen the Southern Cross. It took him a long time to see what I was pointing at, some weeks back, because it is famous and small and dim: a cross properly. Dame Southern Land. The reef, the trees, the ineffable quiet hills. All of the creatures who burrow along the branches or through soil here underneath my head. The long beach, the wrecked mountains, the pulse. I’ll fight for you.
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doesn’t that seem unusual?
Berlin, Berlin, I cannot but love you. Unbelievable, unmistakeable. The contrast to Copenhagen is immediate. At the airport nothing works. Every toilet is barred with tape and the man in the kiosk is grumpy but funny. He raises his eyebrows and shrugs. We are laughing. The train smells faintly of old urine. When we get out to change trains at Ostkreuz, for a moment I’m wondering can we have stumbled into a party? A party on the train platform, doesn’t that seem unusual? But it’s just a bunch of Sunday night revellers, standing about talking loudly and all of them wearing various casual, scraped-together outfits, some in funky, messy costumes, a girl with her afro pared into a kind of wave and bleached orange is crouching earnestly over her bags, sorting methodically a magical melee of things from one gaping leather satchel to another. She has on a short pair of shorts and some kind of shearling vest cut high around the ears. The moon drifts high, high, high above the scene, it does look like a scene, grubby and fitted out like a film set built by many hands. The train fills with the noise of someone’s ghetto blaster and the smell of stale alcohol. People are drunk. By the smell of it, some have been drunk for several days: a smell not of spilled beer or Red Bull breath but of old booze leaking from people’s pores. Three ladies with their suitcases ask my friend directions, he answers confidently and then grows confused for a moment when pointing out the outermost stations on the map above the door. The boy opposite catches my eye over his girlfriend’s head and we both laugh, laugh for a while, one setting the other off with a glance when the other stops gasping. The three pretty girls with demure frocks and curly hair are smiling tolerantly. The newly-arrived ladies wave when we get off. “Have a great time in Berlin,” my friend says. The love. The moon. The insanity. The mess. The three drunken Polish guys who ask for money, shoving a filthy coffee cup under my nose and rattling it. “Für beer und weed?” The gasp that leaps out of me when we reach street level and a low tide of litter has buried, like old snow, the bottom of all the tyres on all the bicycles locked to the railway station railing.
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I slept out
Last night in Switzerland. I slept out. The moon disentangled itself from the cherry tree and slowly drew a shallow course across the horizon, pulsing through the cloud its fitful gleams. Every time I opened my eyes the stalks and undercarriages of daisies on the bush by me struck dark green and white as white into the grey moon sky. Airplanes drew chalk lines back and forth at long intervals: there is something more for me to learn here. Nearer by far a single mosquito visited, penetrating sleep in its several manifestations. I slapped myself again upside the head. I could hear two people talking quietly on the verandah in the apartments downstream. I could hear the river’s greedy mumblings, little sucking and slurping rushes and a longer, darker bass dragging underneath. In Berlin to orient myself I will dip my feet one by one in the Spree and tell myself as so often I have told, My darling, All water is one.
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Clive James
Perception is a funny thing. I’m feeling, though cheerful enough, somewhat tired & old, chubby & worn. Men are looking at me. One of them twisted his head to look back and came close to walking himself into a pole.
Another time I was feeling all fresh & funky, I had on this beautiful green print sundress, I scampered early out of the Adelaide Writers Week crowd and began lolloping up the hill. I was laughing with shame, having just inadvertently told Clive James I thought his poetry was quite good, “especially lately.” Argh. As I passed a group of people sitting on the low wall a young man raised his head and sang out, “Ew! You’re old. Get away from me! I hate old people.”
That was fifteen years ago. Today it’s all smiles & waves. Is it the dungarees? The grubby sandshoes? The sunshine? The moon? Billy Bragg puts it neatly, mortality: “Like a pale moon in a sunny sky/death gazes down as I pass by/to remind me that I’m but my father’s son.”