Last week I stood on water for the first time in my life. So eerie. My friend rang, saying, there are people on the river! and I ran down to look. There they were, casual as anything, crossing the water from side to side. Today it is raining in a dreary way as though the clouds were melting and it occurred to me, so warm was it when I left the house, that it cannot be winter for ever. It seems like it’s going to be: but it won’t.
Tag: snow
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pure new cold all over
It’s snowing! It’s snowing! It’s snowing! I came into a cafe going, It’s snowing, and she said, I know, and I said, But – it’s snowing! and then hours later walked out into the dark and under the golden lights every car wore a fresh crisp white bonnet, my old tears burst its banks, oh – snow.
In my cafe two fellows in black beards were drawing at a big round table and as the cafe closed two girls in long tresses came up to say, So? Are you drawing? They looked up, patiently. The girls were pretty and the boys kind. “So do you do this professionally? Or…”
Ah, yes. That tasteful first question, also asked of every dentist and every builder’s labourer – so how much do you get paid for that? The taller girl plumped her bag down on top of the nearer guy’s paints. She got out her phone. “May I?” Yes, he said, standing back so that she could take a picture of his work. Her friend said, Doesn’t it bother you, working in a cafe? Behind her packing up my laptop and my notebooks I answered for him, only quietly – the only thing that bothers me about working in a cafe is that people come up and interrupt, this has happened to me many times, someone actually waving their hand under my nose to get my attention so that they can say, Doesn’t it bother you working in a place like this, how can you concentrate?
Coming out into the fresh snow, unexpected and perfectly flawless just yet, I saw a man – let’s say a man – had drawn a huge erect penis on the rump of one of those anointed cars, cos some people don’t understand perfection. I could hear children cluttered round the corner shrieking in their snowsuits, that time of year! is here! so I put down the palm of my hand on someone’s bonnet to make a snow angel of five long fingers, marking: I too see this snowing time of year. This indoor landscape. Domain of families and gold. I too am here.
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when the snow
The dog and I went out for a late night walk. The rest of the world is his toilet. It is snowing! It must have been snowing now several hours. The purity general, all over Ireland.
I walked along the still, dark canal following his trail and we passed not a single person. The unbroken white page of the path, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and now. Walking gingerly, in my ugg boots and pajamas. Snow fell in my hair and lit its tangles, snow fell into the hood of my coat. I scraped a handful an arm-length long of snow, showing the black German soil underneath. I hurled a snowball at a tree, black tree, the world a silent movie.
On the black water white swans lay like popcorn milling and distinct in the perfect night. The trees overhanging the water were rendered all postcard-immaculate in snow’s quietude, every branch of every tree the chosen branch of the chosen tree. Oh, the perfection of freshly-laid snow. A swan sneezing three hawking gasps under the stone-arch bridge sounded like a car that’s reluctant to start. Swandom: it isn’t all elegance. But they swim silently and sleep in a coil, wreath of snow, and the snow unlike rain falls so quietly. It is a powder and a liquid. You can harvest it, solid one moment then gone, on a night walk where everything’s blessed by the freeing fresh cold and the silent houses stand like mirages. Hold back your head, hold out your hand. After we turned at the corner I lipped up several little swanlings morsels of snow-white snow off the greensteel spikes guarding the soft white stone church. I thought, this snow is heilige snow.
A Swedish friend had come by earlier in the night and said, lounging back on his chair, your apartment is like a little boat. It has big white windows and outside no lights, you see only the stars. We came in after midnight from the white world without and set sail once more into silence of unending black water, the vast night, the sea of tranquility. Blessed honeyside of the moon. Winter has arrived at last and like the Spring rains in the steaming tropics it brings with it privacy, silences, long dark salty solitudes. I am a dormant seed tucked in my blankets and this tiny ferry still crossing the water, a little, led barge.
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street friendships
I just fell into one of those instant street-friendships that sometimes lead somewhere and very often don’t. It is so lonely & exacting trying to make a life in a completely new city, I seem to have been doing it over and over the last ten years as I wonder: where is it that the tribe of people ~ who are poets, and deeply sensitive & reflective, and are peace-loving activists, and like to laugh and dance a lot, and care about the world and all who sail in her ~ find their home?
So this was not a moment too soon. I’d come out of the Underground and was tramping through the snow which has mounted so rapidly all day today. A woman beside me suddenly spoke. “What? Is this Christmas?” She indicated the white sky, the buried trees, the white-piling pavements. “Yes,” I said, “and I was just noticing, I have never seen these kind of tiny snowballs before – they’re not really flakes – they are like drops of water.” “Stimmt,” she said, musingly, gazing at the tiny white balls crunching underfoot. She is a yoga teacher and teaches art therapy. We reached the snowy markets and parted. There were all kinds of activities this weekend, she said, to celebrate Spring – such as it is – and would I like to have coffee in this gallery cafe her mate runs and go for a wander. Well, as it happens yes, I very much rather would. Thank you, snowboat universe.
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everything soft, and white, and powdery
Tramping through the fresh snow, everything soft and white and powdery. Like daylight the snow lies unequivocally on everything. Six bursting, screeching, whumphing shapes pass overhead like white explosions and resolve themselves, by a process of frantic backpedalling, into swans. As they land on the water they one by one become graceful and fleet. I smile at the tall man opposite, who stops. “I know you! I know your face.” “Well, I don’t think so, I’m Australian, I’ve only been here a few months.” “But I know your face! Pretty face, you’ve got. Can I take it?” He holds up a camera with a large, open lens. “What for?” I say. “Nicht zum verkaufen,” he assures me (not for selling), “just because I’d like to.” He shows me the picture, my kilos of red scarf and ridiculous beanie. Around us the world is white and a golden dog plunges through the fresh snowdrifts, spluttering. The swans have forgotten their panic and sail like perfection under the very old, arched green stone bridge.
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through snow
a bell dings behind me, I step aside and watch the beautiful line of a bicycle’s tyres, drawing like dark pencil on white paper through the snow
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the man with bare fingers
The man with bare fingers playing guitar at the riverside markets, in the snow. He is playing a languid, spooling version of “I’ve Done All the Dumb Things” by Paul Kelly. In his hands it sounds musing rather than regretful. The two Australians drifting in front of me hatless, talking about parties. The boy who writes in the same cafe as me and who gives a shy smile as he passes on the street. The candlelit cafe playing Echo and the Bunnymen: “The Killing Moon.” The shivering persons who have to go outside for cigarettes. The lovely guitarfurl at the end of the song. The manuscript with biro marks all over it.
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flimsy
River is freezing over and the swans and ducks have a narrow, darker path that they can swim through. Feathered ice-breakers. The ice is flimsy and resembles the scuzzy glass of an uncleaned shower cabinet but there are pure, sheer white patches where the overnight snow lies untouched and I can see two yellow leaves scudding across the white surface like spinnakers.
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I’m not sure you’re taking this entirely seriously
Went to the outdoor store to try on their $1000 goose-down & coyote fur jackets. “Made in Canada,” the sales guy explained as I was falling about laughing at the price: “Canadian wages.” “Ah,” I said. “Everyone wants Fair Trade but no one wants to pay any more for it.” He leveled his trigger finger at me: You Are Exactly Right.
Who has the money for this kind of malarky? They had a hat, with furry earpieces, a snip at 300 Euros. That’s, oh, around 375 Australian pesos. They had parkas in a seductive scarlet which have big hoods rimmed in fur. Magic. You put the hood up and you can’t see two feet in front of your face. The salesman folded the fur back for me: “Now can you see out?” “The street, yes. Stars, no.” He let his head fall to one side. “I’m not sure you’re taking this entirely seriously.”
Finally I bought a more ordinary hat, very warm, so warm it made me want to strip off a couple of layers. Leaving the shop I saw the original salesman, who had been called away to another section, leaning on a display cabinet of vicious-looking knives. He looked so bored. I tapped on the window from the snowy footpath to make him look up. In pantomime I showed him the successful and awesome furry-hat purchase, drew it out of my satchel and put it on to demonstrate how it makes me look like a Russian farmer maiden. His face split in an enormous grin. Thumbs up, he said. Thumbs up, I said. Thumbs up, said his colleague over his shoulder. Warm in the brain. It only now occurs to me the word ‘demon’ is embedded (devilishly) in the word ‘demonstrate.’ So all those door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen in the 50s were maybe like the anecdote, I mean the antidote, to God’s helpers who spread out on the ground and say, You take the poor suburbs, I’ll take the rich.
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like a cake
Went down to the print shop to ask him to make me a copy of one of the two novels I’m hoping to finalize this winter. Like a PhD student at the far end of his thesis I lean on the counter and say cosily, “I wrote all of that. Can you believe…?”
The man laughs, a friendly laugh. I am thinking of the cartoon where the doctor examining an X-Ray tells his disappointed patient, “I’m sorry, Mr Bundle. I’m afraid you really don’t have a novel in you.” I say to the print guy, “I can see now why not everyone writes books. They are hard work.”
He spends a long time stacking and restacking the pages with his expert hands, the paper silky and obedient. Turning the pile of pages to stand landscape, then portrait, then landscape again he deftly slaps all the spiky leaves into one great block. Then he stows the whole thing in an exactly A4-sized carton which springs open from flat stowage. Glancing at me he reaches behind him and takes another carton, which he fits over the top. “Like a cake!” I say and carry it home in two hands through the freezing wind.