A Time For Tenderness.

         The time for tenderness arrives with its quiet way and delicate sensibilities. The kettle is too shy to whistle, the pots do not shine. Boots shuffle, but will not clatter across the flags, their surfaces too numb for sound. This is the way of things; quiet voices; hankies not blown but dabbed at dewy eyes. 

Outside this room, where sickness has not swallowed hope, the sun shines and birds still sing in the hawthorn hedge. But here, there is a pall hanging which cannot be dislodged like leaves in the autumn branches.

Emotion is a bitter bed-fellow, thickening the throat and threatening to choke. Spoons stir and clink apologetically and people try to offer comfort through tiny bites of sandwich. 

         A lone child skitters beneath the veil of sadness playing with marbles. Grown ups are so strange and quiet. Why will nobody play anymore? The child takes herself outside to chase leaves and catch ‘copters falling from the sycamore.

Some un-measureable force alerts her mother to her absence.

‘Where is Ivy?’

She says it to herself. There is no one else to listen now. Strings of panic tangle her inside and pull at the taught laces round her heart. She speaks again, this time to be heard, to be saved.

‘Where’s Ivy?’

Ode to Joy

Joy is a kitten playing with string.
Joy is a baby as it laughs on a swing.
Joy is a jig, a highland fling.
Joy is the feeling I get when I sing.
Joy is the gift that my children bring.
Joy: the emotion without any sting.

Restoration

Sometimes a series of seemingly random phrases cohere to make a sense of their own. This is one such:

There is plenty to share:

A year of April’s to keep in your head 

While all about you fiddle with the buttons on their coat.

Embrace the drum that urges you on.

Sing with ease and joy or however the spirit moves you.

Seek the glittering truth

Of who you can be.

Even as the crow flies

In confettied blossom and precious scent

Somewhere East of Mandarin mettle meets metal:

Magnatised,

Galvanised,

With strenghth, with hope, with honesty.

Stride forward. Face and embrace, with integrity,

The glittering truth of who you can be.

Moon Knows

Moon knows what lies beyond the end of her beam: a brass kaleidoscope of trinkets and tuk-tuks, neon teddies and troubadours, paper and pencils. Somewhere there is a pestle and mortar grinding blood from wolf or wolf from boy. Nothing is as it seems as it twists over and over in geometry’s repetitive bite.

In a small town outside Seville a boy sits at an old fashioned school desk, its lid scarred with the dreams and desires of the classmates gone before him. Next to the black hole an ink blot of the virgin and the holy ghost watch him constantly. Truancy is not an option. Open on the desk lies ‘Materia Gramatica’ and he stares as hard as he can through conjugations and consternation in a desire to conjure the images in the leather-bound photograph album that lies an inch below wood, incarcerated, entombed within the coffin of the desk.

The teacher comes in, his spectacles two moons. He will settle for nothing but blood. He is Master of the strap. The boy sees the words melt on the page, feels his nails bite into his palms. It is the photographs that have landed him in this predicament yet still he loves them. How can he not? The photographs hold happiness in stasis. The happiness of lives already run, already lost. Children who he had only known as old men and women or not at all and yet there they were, children just like him. He was their incarnation, a seed of generations past. They too had sat in this school room. Had they sat at this desk? Been watched over by the Virgin. Had one of them conceived the holy ghost. Was Moonface there then too? Moon knows.

Sailing Away

Taste the air, touch the sky. Could it be magic Cressida, this portal to another life? 

The chalice body holds grief but I would fill it with the milk and honey of a new land and return renewed, resurrected. 

I sang the pirates gospel for a time. It was a long song and the rhythm carried me far from myself into storms and tempests, across currents of green and white foam. It was a song of surrender so simple even the ship’s cat could join in but when the carousing died away I was spelled into nothingness: caught in a cavity between latitude and longitude. All that was left was the swell of the sea, no point on the horizon to steer by.

It was not my song. 

I thirst for a visceral communion of my own Cressida, rather than being tangled up in blue. Give me the crimson heat of colour and the saffron fire of the sun. Give me the green of the earth not the gold of the casket: I have no need of the pirate hoard. I need to find the frequency that resonates within me: my mind, my chalice. 

What holds us together? Chalice body holds us together. One tree many leaves.

All in a day's work

Can the curtain fall gold? The Midas touch of morning light. Let it make you happy. Watch the play unfold. Bread sellers, shoe sellers, three on a white trike laden with herbs, a tide of scooters urging the onion seller on, while the garlic seller turns catherine wheels down the street in an attempt to escape his own smell. 

The musicians are out and the jugglers too. Their clothes are torn and patched but their smiles are wide and their hearts are warm. How you bring out the light in us.
Tumblers come to defy gravity. I hold their hat while they show how its done, pass it round for spare coins. No! Give someone else the key I don’t want the responsibility. Look how they tumble in Prussian blue and gold and shake off the rust of the day, clearing a path of filtered light. 

Afternoon comes and shadows lengthen. A conference of elephants break off their debate. They stand and sway to an unseen band, their trunks like pendulums. They are watching a knot of women hold up sheets, fold folding folded: an ivory origami. It is an intricate dance of mothers and daughters, corner to corner, centre and back. Who has the right, the chicken or the egg? Elephants nod respectfully at the interplay of generations.

And the glint of light glosses sharp edges smooth as the curtain of day falls. White turns to gold, to Prussian blue, then seeps into the cracks of the earth to wait for resurrection. 

Love is Blind

Seabird swoops through violent light, taut with the intensity of love, to spy on the two. How sure they are when the waters are calm thinks Seabird.

She:     You have my heart.

He:      And my own. Two hearts that beat as one.

She:     But I have yours

He:      And you have mine. A copacetic love.

She:     No god could be happier.

He:      They beat on their sky drum to attract our attention

She:    Their beaters are weakened by worms. They cannot beguile us.

He:      They are jealous.

She:     They should be.

He:       They live between the ticks and the tocks.

She:     And we have all the time in between as well.

He:       Oh, fortunate lovers!

She:     Oh, fortunate love!

He:       Zeus loved Hera but I have you.

She:     Look, Aphrodite sends her milky owl to spy on us, to learn what true love is.

He:       She will stammer in her retelling of it.

She      Knowing it cannot be matched?

He:       Knowing it cannot be matched.

Seabird knows perspective changes everything. Easy to be lovers when there is no adversity. Seabird dives. What tremor will create a storm in this teacup, drown the self-satisfied giggle of the two so they know to ask for the help of the gods? 

Lost

Compass my direction for I cannot find my path. Show me the way to the beginning let me come full circle; the end is not what I had hoped.

When it began I was a believer, unquestioning, full of hope that our stories would be stronger entwined. For a while it seemed they would be but the fibres of our twine were not strong enough to rope together. Yours were splintered dry coconut coir while mine were lanolin-rich wool. What kind of rope could we tease from that matt of textures? 

The mesh never quite came together. The combination causing rucks and gaps where important things fell through, no more useful than a mosquito net with holes. Rumour. Doubt. Blame. Lies. The holes got bigger . You cannot mend the net with carlesness so love fell away like fish, scale after scale to reveal a new truth: life was sieved; sorted but separate.

Clara was nothing. 

Too dark to see, too dark for breath she hid her barnacle heart. She had been forced to live at the bottom of the deep blue See-sea Sea in a world of her own after joy had been stolen from her by a sourceress and she had been left with no hope and a shrunken heart. She was so dark and twisted that she dare not emerge from her briny layer and instead had remained beyond light for so long she had almost shrunk to nothing.

But as she had shrunk, the barnacle heart had become a bigger portion of what was left and just as change seemed impossible she heard it: the faint flutter of the heart within. Through the dark it beat, tempting her memory with coral and sea pinks, starfish and sea-holly, each as precious as a pearl from an oyster. 

The only thing that stands in my way is fear, she thought,  fear of my own limitations. But I am a lion, I am Boudicca. What care I for the judgement of others? 

And so she began the long translation of herself, conjugating her past into her present.

Fernicular, fernicularum, ferniculis. 

A spell of the sea-side. A spell for raising miracles. What could it bring except release?

The great creatures of the deep swam spirals about her and a blue whale brought bubbles of crystal light to curtain her rise toward the sun. Cradled thus she began her ascent and, as she did, small joys came back to her: where the cuckoo nests, the smell of crushed summer grass, the billow of dandelion clocks and rivers of gold wind-wavering corn. Eventually she heard the bubbles fizz and pop about her and for the first time in as long as she could remember she felt the kiss of air upon her face, then she heard the scrape of a boat bottom on sand and knew that she was free.