Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: nest

the peace yard

Walking home down rainy streets my last night in this house. Tomorrow unnest, budge myself, nudge, shift. Winter has landed with its big wings. Now the warmth of the indoors folds us in, the subway’s roaring throat, we all descend, we bring our dogs and biscuits. I saw two small boys fighting in the subway train, one slammed his hand down on the other one’s shoulder their sister put back her head and roared. They were hipheight to everyone’s delicate glances, the mother looked estranged. In this city if they serve you tea it is a mess of hot water in a clear jar (hard, chalky water, that dries white) and with spoon and bag of leaves laid on the white milky ceramic… neatly. Effervescent neatness, the German delight: effortless neatless and high art and kitsch. German joy, Friede; German graveyard, Friedhof. I’m leaving I’m leaving. I’m coming I’m coming: Australia wait for me. Maybe forever as jet blurting travel grows inexcusably wrong. Standing stranded on the traffic island as the creamy lights pour in three strands down the hill like pearls and the crimson lights pour like Christmas up: I said something aloud to myself in German, I started to cry. Thank you for your hospitality, your kindness, your warmth to all the strangers, your strangeness, your calm. The leaves shaped like webbed hands that wave in the wind. The strings of lights under the lip of each awning. The Grüss dich, the Tschüssi in shops, the dogs. In 24 mornings more, I’ll be gone.

November 20, 2013
eggshellac

Like a little eggshell in the sky. I have moved into my final Berlin sublet, just 3 weeks, and barely dare breathe. Everything is white down to the phone, painted roughly with house paint but still black on the inside when you pick up the receiver. In the little white bathroom a toilet with no lid and no seat. A tiny wooden vegetable brush perches primly across the back of the… mouth of the sewer. I said to my landlady, who is off to India for three weeks to translate Arabic manuscripts, “No toilet seat?” “Oh, did you notice that? Does it bother you?” “Well…”

She said, “I guess it’s a bit cold, and kind of uncomfortable, but it broke and I just realized, I don’t really need this.” I foresee that within a few years she will be living cross-legged on the head of a pin. The place is quiet and curtainless and resembles a tiny Buddhist monastery. Floorboards painted white. White rugs which, she showed me, she cleans with a little brush. She pulled out a rush cushion from under the low white bed to show me: “This makes a great table, for eating.” Then she set off in the November rain through streets full of sticky wet leaves to fly south, with one little blue bag, wearing a pair of socks inside white sandals. Mysteriously there is no mat at the front door, yet everything within is pristine. My landlady had also painted her little computer white, including all the keys, but then had to scrub most of them back to the original black so that she could see what they were. Her patchy keyboard in the chalky white room was startling, a giant crossword. We exchanged money and keys this morning and she showed me around. “I have these two spoons.” Four plates, two bowls, and a couple cups, no pepper, oils, pans, forks, knives. “Poor little flower,” said the friend who helped me carry my suitcases. “You get the feeling that a gust of wind would blow her away.” I on the other hand will not be having that problem. In just 18 months my pile of cases and boxes has swollen like paper in water to twice their original dimensions. I think of the old cartoon of a bag lady pleading not guilty on a charge of shoplifting “by reason of static cling.” To get home I will have to divest myself of a rowboat full of leaves, intricately rusted bottlecaps, brochures and books that I picked up and brought home because they seemed beautiful or interesting. This might be the perfect place to do it. In between, I will loll in the tub and read, an egg in an eggcup in a large eggshell in the grey, minimalist skies over Germany.

November 3, 2013
decanticle

I’m alone in the house and my heart feels filled with love. It’s a feeling like glass-slippered waves coming in over your feet on the sparkling, rough sand, so shallow you barely get wet but the softness of the water is inexpressible. Like water from stars, I mean light, I mean starlight, the salt water travels a long way to get to us. Maybe all of the love in my heart is from long-extinct volcanoes burning in other skies. I love the sounds of other people’s lives around me, I love the roaring restaurants that spill out along the street. I loved the girl dourly smoking Gauloises as her lover nuzzled into her neck. The little Thai restaurant, the bar on the corner with a waiter whose beautiful shoulders and tiny pigtail sprouting from the crown of his shaven head were so irresistible to watch. I love the sandpit at the playground with its no smoking sign. I love the little purling hair growing out of this soft mole on my cheek, its familiarity, its curve. I love the way the sky sets off immediately where the ground ends and goes, as far as we know, forever and ever and never ceases to be. Asking nothing and accepting everything. I love the blackness and the blue. The flowers that close up at night, like awnings. The irregular army of bottle-collectors, and people with spray cans and brooms.

August 7, 2013
living in the garden

Last night I slept under my own roof for the first time in four months. So to speak. It’s a beautiful sublet in a groovier part of town, bristling with bars, but very quiet behind the city wall of our foremost apartment building. I’m in the back, windows facing the trees, in a place with high ceilings and old DDR coal stoves clad in green and corn-coloured ceramic tiles. Downstairs is a baby with lusty lungs. A black and white cat sleeps in the courtyard. The owner of the flat spends her summers living ‘in the garden’ just outside town, which sounds idyllic, and has rented me her keys, her crockery, her weird hot water system, her dreamy curtains. Turning off the reading light I felt momentarily assailed by ghosts and spirits, a movement in the darkness, a sense of swarming: all the people who have lived in this old building in the past; and it occurred to me this was my first night sleeping out, beyond the palings, in the saddening wilderness of old-time East Berlin.

August 3, 2013
gambolling habit

A few years back this young cat came up to me in a kitten shelter and climbed onto my lap. I didn’t want her, the others were all fluffy, rolypoly babies winsome with whiskers and she was an awkward teenager with a big splotch on her nose. Whenever I visited the shelter there were kittens cutely gambolling all over and sucking on my toes (“they like the sweat” explained the cat breeder, who loved animals and had bred so many the Council were compelling her to give some away)… then I looked down and this skinny, weird-looking animal had stowed her sharp chin on my hip. Every time. I put her in a banana box and took her home. Her name is Tisch, I miss her sometimes but she is a lousy correspondent.

July 28, 2013
mouth bandit

Some days I really miss my cat. She is grey & downy and is a right little snuggleupagus. She’s also a kind of miracle cat because she got lost one night, this was in inner Melbourne, and stayed lost for five months until one day someone rang in response to one of my posters, saying, I think your cat is living in our backyard. She had survived as a street cat and was thin but unharmed. Whilst not living in alleyways she likes to harvest unattended hair elastics from the desks of working poets and will carry them about in her mouth for hours, tirelessly playing fetch…. like a little dog. I love her but we always had two separate piles: mine (to hold my hair back) and hers (a bit manky from being scuffled and chewed).

One thing I love about cats is their ambition. I would see her crouched at the foot of a wall, every fibre bristling with concentration as she sighted up a browsing mosquito or a shadow under the ceiling. “I can take that, I can totally take it!” And yet they seem to have no other desire than to laze. Most important of all is: be comfortable. Always be comfortable.

April 30, 2013