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.
Tonight I saw the moon for the first time in ages and my heart caught fire from its coldness. Only a more-or-less moon, more than a morsel and less than a round, most of its pearl face unhidden by us. Severely it rode the dark blackwater sky. All about me everything was frozen.
You see, I am still living in the dreamtime, where my ancestors are my brothers & sisters and trees my playmates. Sometimes I’m wiser and sometimes they’re wiser. We hold hands on the street. There are streets everywhere and everything is streets. Sometimes the world overwhelms me. I cannot move & I cannot speak, cannot use the keypad & the online booking form & can do nothing to understand anything at all. Would follow a guttering candle flame for miles along the quiet river in the dark. Stare in through the golden windows, row after row after row after row, longing for a way into the wilderness. That is the only world that tames my heart. I’m so lonely, I’m only longing, and I cannot settle. Underneath it all there is a roaring like fire or water.
I feel widowed. I am winnowing. Dancing through this manuscript one last time with my tiny stave ~ of ink ~ finding out the hollow places where the old log gives ~ and pressing down ~ and crumbling those away, a crocodile who stores everything edible beneath the melted snowline, in a slurry ~ these are final final edits, so I tell myself, believing myself ~ and I glean the tiniest changes, like when an apostrophe is shaped to the wrong font, and must be corrected. I winkle them out & fling them far far into the shoreline glimmering dislodged like oysters.
The name of this collection is Comb the Sky With Satellites, It’s Still a Wilderness. A
nd it talks about the world we live in and how we have failed to wreck it.