Late night walk through the freezing fog. “Like Blade Runner.” We turn down all the opportunities in the park to buy pot. Here is a street where all the houses are Fifties, which must have been a firebomb hell in the 1940s. I stand there picturing it. Smoke curls up from the narrow tin chimneys of the caravans walled in along the water’s edge. Overhead, a syncopated honking. “It’s very late… for gooses to be flying around in the sky.” The laughter escapes between my closed lips. “Oh,” he says self-consciously – “I mean geeses.”
Tag: river path
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a beauty
When I woke up I remembered the beautiful girl who was sitting outside a coffee booth by the river yesterday. She got out her phone and scrolled, she was luminous like a black pearl. When we were leaving I went up to her and said, Excuse me. Do you speak English. Yes, she said, in American. I always prefer to give compliments on the way out, to avoid creating half an hour of shared embarrassment where they have to keep smiling at you for thank you, or avoid looking your way. “You’re so beautiful,” I told her, “it makes me happy to see you. Beautiful, classy face. Bless you.”
She looked shy and pleased and said Thanks, very soft. All along the river path people were pushing their bicycles, sitting in the sun on benches, tramping with their large and small dogs. I guess everyone is beautiful when you look closely but some people wear it like a treasure they are trapped inside of, which casts its light on everyone they pass.
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never the swain
Two swains drifting like white roses on the dark canal. My Berliner swain calls them swains and I never correct him. Similarly I refrained for reasons of selfish enjoyment from pointing out to an earlier, South Australian swain, who though a native speaker was heartily dyslexic (he called our chimney ‘the chumley’), that the swans’ babies are commonly called ‘cygnets’. ‘Look Oel. A mummy and a daddy swan. And all the little swanlings.’