Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: night walk

  • you my queen

    “Oh my queen,” said a man walking behind me in the dark African night, and we both walked on a little. There are streetlights intermittent every four hundred metres or so and I have missed this dark. It’s beguiling and mysterious. It’s sexy. Faces loom out of it and I know so few of them.

    “You, lady,” the same man said, and I turned. Me? His face was crumpled with disfigurement and he lifted his soft fingers bashfully when I waved. “Hello,” I said, and went on walking. “Oh,” he said, “oh yes, my lady.”

    You arrive at the stall and say, Good evening. Good evening, say all three stallholders, and ‘good evening’ has four syllables. Carrying my purchases I went past the wheel rim up on bricks which is filled with glowing coals, where a lady with her head wrapped in cloth deep fries bubbling plantain patties. I went past the hardware stall the size of a wardrobe where a cheerful man also sells homemade local toffee (sugar cane and coconut) bound in clotted ropes of plastic like tiny frankfurters. The toffee hangs looped among the pipe fittings and elbow joints strung like vast ceremonial necklaces on long lines. Everything glows, to me, as though this were the world I walked out of at twelve, leaving Java, and since then had sought the wardrobe door.

  • the night so vast

    Walking at night through the little woods that runs along the shore. I can hear a muted guitar playing from across the water. The dirty water in the dark looks black and clean as ink. Spring is thickening and the trees reach in from either side, closing the path. You have to be swallowed in it. The low thrum of summer night conversation peppers along the canal. The smell of pot. The smell of cigarettes. The clinking of old bottles as a man wheeling his laden bicycle stops under a streetlamp to readjust them all so tenderly in their bags, with furrowing care as though he were collecting them to keep. When I turned down last night an invitation to the birthday party of a man who lives in a van in a village of vans in a thicket where the cherry trees were all pink in April his brother, who’d invited me, said, You should come, we will have a fire in a barrel. Like New York. His brother, he said, had a telescope and this was a telescope party. “Saturn,” he said, the German way, “and her rings and… Jupiter.” I turned for home under the linden trees and he told me how every village had its linden once: with a bench running round it, the Dorflinden. I’m alone now, in the manner of people who don’t go to parties, and my eyes are swollen from crying, and sore. The headache lifts and disintegrates from my shoulders as I walk on, caring for little and everything, reaching the peace inside like dark water. Right at the far end the moon hovers low over the broadening trees and the water, a doorway to infinite peace, an intermittently rattling blind, a prize.