Bright window. Haiku

 

Bright window of time

All our seasons passing by

Our eyes on the sky

Someone else's clothes

 

He shrugged it on,

It being the hug of a coat

found in the middle of a rail

amongst other men's shirts.

Heavy, the collar gently chafed 

the back of his neck 

cleaving to its materials.

The weight of another man's coat

Hanging from his shoulders. 

Lexicon

 

Lexicon

Life

Live

Love

Lean

Learn

Listen

Lemon

Light

Leftover

Leopard

Leap

List

Lax

Lead

Lip

Limp

Lope

Liver

Lover

Lump

Lamp

Lone

Loan

Lamb

Limb

Lily

Late

Letter

Latter

Litter

Leave

Lest

Lent

Lisp

Lapidary 

Lapis Lazuli

Latin

Lazy

Limp

Loin

Level

List

Laconic

Lurk

Lend

Lascivious

Lament

Last

Lost

Laughter

Lovely

Lawn

Lorn

Love

Line

Linger

My cousin Jack

 

My cousin Jack,

Wild child,

Looked like Twiggy in her teens,

Gave her coat to a stranger once 

Because they said they liked it.

And so when she went missing,

My mother kept repeating,

She hasn't got a coat,

she hasn't even got a coat.

She left without a coat upon her back.

Jack, why did you do that,

Please come back. 

                     -

Together in the dark cinema,

They eye the neon EXIT signs.

Holding hands throughout the film,

Squeezing hard at scary parts,

They share each other's fears.

                      -

Everyone wants to die sometimes, she said, buttering her toast. 

Not me, I said, because sometimes, you have to lie. 

Why ???? !

Because life's shit then you die, came her sharp reply,

Then turned her gaze directly upon me,

So I began to cry. 

All originally written for #satsplat

Why I write

 

I write because I read

I write to remember

To find myself

To retain my sense of self

To uncover the world

To allow new thoughts in

To expand my thinking

To understand myself 

To extend my feeling

To learn how to be

To understand how I affect the world

and other beings

Building a garden; poem

I

watched you pave the yard with bricks you found half buried in the soil. I watched you toil and pick them out And clear and clean until, You'd made a garden. Then, when the grass had grown, I spread a cloth upon the lawn, And we had tea, You, my bears and me.

Poem

 

I needed some words,

Something to soothe my poor head,

To stop the spinning 

roundelay that played each day. 

I found poetry.  

Unrequited Love. Memory and feelings.

Peter’s mum brought me a basket of fruit when I’d been off school for seven weeks with whooping cough. Peter hated school when I wasn’t there apparently. 6 year old me didn’t really like him wanting to sit next to me all the time, but, of course, I still let him.

Mum came in wielding a basket of fruit. Who's Peter she demanded. A boy in my class; I said, avoiding her eyes but gazing instead at the huge bananas. You're too young for boyfriends she admonished. It's ok I don't like him, he's silly, I replied, idly eating a grape.

______

Above are two little vignettes wot I wrote for a hashtag prompt on Twitter to write something on unrequited love.

My first thought was about an incident in my junior school days when I was off school with whooping cough, and, in the spirit of Allen Ginsberg, I went with that. As I was struggling to remember what it was, I wrote the second tale, in retrospect, a rather lame attempt at humour and to convey how one can sometimes be disinterested in matters of the heart, which feels childish, or perhaps childlike, to me.

The first attempt was me trying to make sense of it, trying, as an adult, to understand and justify the only things which remain of the incident; feelings and atmosphere. As a child, and as an adult too sometimes, I often feel quite remote from the effect I may have on others. Even as I try hard to imagine what it might be, it takes effort, and time, for it to percolate through sometimes.

The actual or factual memory I have is very hazy and probably mostly inaccurate as I think they mostly are ; sitting at my desk - a copy of an old school desk with a lift up lid, an ink well and bent metal legs - outside in the yard each day and every day for most of the day if it was fine, I think because my mum thought the fresh air would help me, in a similar way to the way TB patients had been helped by the fresh air cure, taking my own class register - I'd made up all the names on it, goodness knows where they came from, they often used to pop into my head even until just recently, - and enjoying planning and marking lessons for my imaginary class. I seem to remember they were all rather bad at maths, like me.

I don't remember being too bothered by the illness itself, though I do remember the whoop, most vividly when I have a winter cough, when mum frog marching me to the tap to stick my head firmly under running cold water which seemed to pull me out of it comes rushing back to me on some occasions and my cough becomes a little asthmatic.

I know my mum felt guilty about not having me vaccinated against this horrible disease and the reasons were similar to those which prevent some parents taking their children for the MMR vaccines. I don't remember my brother being around during that time and I think perhaps he was sent away to stay with someone so as not to catch it too.

So it was that my poor mum was no doubt very fraught during the ten or so weeks it took me to recover, hence my depicting her response to what was rather a touching gesture from a little boy in my class, as somewhat testy and ungracious.

In truth, I can't imagine she would have been bothered, or surprised, by anyone enjoying my company. My dear mum thought the sun shone from me when I was small. Or so I felt. However, I can imagine and vaguely remember her being bothered by the rather, I think she thought, extravagant, gift of a basket of fruit, brought to the doorstep.

So I think that for my mum, what was particularly troubling about this incident was not that someone was pining for me particularly, thinking back, it could have been partly because fruit was an expensive luxury to most ordinary people at that time, or certainly, to our family. I went to the shops with mum at least twice a week when I was on holiday and she had a very strict budget. If fruit was bought, it was to be eaten. I could rarely finish a whole apple as a small girl, and so was reticent to embark on one for fear of retribution. I can imagine having a whole basket of fresh fruit to be eaten before it went off would have been quite an annoyance for my mum, and come to think of it, possibly slightly intimidating for me as a child.

Thinking about Peter, although I can remember his name, and his second name too, but I can't remember him in actuality. Our tables were arranged in sets at school and I was, on the ' top table ' with five other girls, all destined for grammar school, though we didn't know it at the time. It's a sad fact that the boys in my class did not register my attention unless they were a) very naughty ( I was sometimes asked to mind the class when our teacher left the room for some reason so I got to know the naughty ones ) or b) I was tasked with showing them how to do something, like tell the time. I don't know quite why I was considered adept at telling the time from an early age. Something else for me to ponder on another occasion perhaps.

I do remember where Peter lived and that's because my mum went to call on his mum at some point. I remember her saying it was to ask that they stop sending me gifts. Since I can only remember the fruit, I presume the other gifts were either refused or returned. Mum told me where their house was; quite close to school, alongside a busy duel carriageway she said and she was at pains to point out that it wasn't such a nice house as ours, and that Peter's dad might not be at home very often, which I related to because my dad was often at work and since he worked shifts, I sometimes didn't see him until the weekend.

In reality, I hadn't been aware of Peter much in my day to day life at school before I contracted whooping cough and had to stay at home and nor do I remember him featuring any more on my return after about ten weeks. To me, he's someone I feel I should have noticed and I'll never know what I truly was to him because of the fact that I didn't.

Well I have a funny theory, that we meet everyone at least twice. Recently I started wondering if I'd met Peter again since I left the town we grew up in and whether he recognised me and whether I had a feeling of recognition when I met him and what he had become.

__________

4th January 2022

4th January 2022

I'm pottering, tutting at the crocuses' newly sprouted green shoots dug up ignominiously by the squirrel, sometimes I think I could love plants more than animals. Covering them back up, I wonder if perhaps I'm part plant because I do love soil. It's really one of the loveliest materials on this Earth. I remember how Ai Weiwei said his father had lived in a hole dug in the ground, but I can't start thinking about that now because the logistics of it will take me too far off at a tangent, so I'll just log that thought for later and go and get the vase with the Christmas flowers in.

As I tip the last of the withered roses, along with their water, over the fence onto the bank, I see that the Holly has spread much further along now and nearly made it to about a third of the way up which is amazing and wonderful, I hope. There's a lot of ivy and I suppose they go together. I don't think the elderberry or the oak will be troubled by their intrusion and the clematis is so huge and bushy it will surely survive. I think about nature journals and wonder about their usefulness. 

I think about small things adding up and the idea that if we could all do some small things regularly, they could have a cumulative effect, a sort of confederacy of virtue which may amount to a kind of effusion  and an appearance of miracles. 

The late afternoon sun draws attention to the hillside. How bright it must be in the rooms of the houses whose windows are glinting. Last night's smattering of snow has melted from the fields behind them, but further up, it's still laying on the tops. A robin lands on one of the electricity power lines which run up the lane and sings its evensong. How I've missed hearing birdsong. 

Looking up into the oak's bare canopy, I like to imagine I can feel its strength. Some of the small pieces which the wind pruned look wizened and completely covered in lichen. One had some ominous black substance oozing from it which I'll have to research. I hope there'll be some medicine if it's a sign of illness. 

Last year I stood here banging a pan for the NHS. Conflicted, I wanted to join in and show that I do appreciate people who choose to care for a living, but at the time, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were being softened up for something and that mere applause was not going to compensate for the sacrifices made. It's a terrible thing to feel at the mercy of something, especially when one's trust has been steadily eroded over time. 

Gazing at the outline of St Peter's against the sunset, I think about someone reading my words, which are, of course, my thoughts, and how, to some extent, that is why one might write, but that also, there is an alchemy at work in writing, in which words sometimes seem to arise from somewhere outside ourself. And I remember, as I go in, why I write.

 

Extract from CÉSAR AIRA: AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A LANDSCAPE PAINTER

This is something that happens in everyday life, after all. When we strike up a conversation, we are often trying to work out what our interlocutor is thinking. … What could be more closed off and mediated than someone else’s mental activity? And yet this activity is expressed in language, words resounding in the air, simply waiting to be heard. We come up against the words, and before we know it, we are already emerging on the other side, grappling with the thought of another mind.

Conversations Cesar Aira

 

I no longer know if I ever fall asleep. If I do, I remain outside of sleep itself, in that constantly moving ring of icy asteroids that circles the dark and immobile hollow of oblivion. It is as if I never enter that shadowy vacuum. I toss and turn, literally, in the zone around it, which is as vast as a world, and actually is the world. I do not lose consciousness. I remain within myself. Thought accompanies me. I don't know if this thought is different from that of full wakefulness; it is, at any rate, very similar.    

    This is how I spend my nights. To entertain myself, I remember conversations I've had with friends during the day: each night, those of the same day. Every day these conversations give me material for memory. Since I stopped working, I've had nothing better to do than get together with my friends and converse for whole afternoons. I've often wondered if my lack of employment is the reason for my sleep disturbance, because before, when I used to work, I slept normally, like everybody else. 

The beginning of Conversations by Cesar Aira

A recommended read.