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.