first gazed twenty years back, woken in a 3 a.m. electrical storm with the drapes billowing and rain-streaked, I stepped to the hotel room balcony to furl them in and saw the tower leering and flaunting at the thunderbolts. I begin to repeat my journeys, older and more worn than the sagging steps to the bell tower. And even as I drive across to Lucca I know I’ll be back to see the tooth a third time, prince or pauper, it’s already writ.
up at 42° on the Firenze omnibus. Too hot for coffee, have to take my morning shot in a crystal bowl of granita.
my Nazca Lines, odd geometries to suggest my daily trials and tasks, the house build, the unwritten books, the cobble-worn claims of memory. I tramp my map, conscious of my dot of light on some Milky Way microfiche.
but I’m still tying my laces. I’m watching the clouds stretch out and the storm welling, watching the butterflies – why so many? – in the construction site garden, only just worked out it’s an Anderson shelter foundation that I thought was a flower bed or compost dump in the back corner. The chemicals moving and changing in my head, another memory locked in, for a while, another me-component. All this data to gaze at, to wonder at. That’s why people write, must be in part, in hope that there’s another lonely soul somewhere out there that reads the lines and shares something akin to that wonder, glances up from the page and out to the clouds and there’s some kind of sharing. It’s the wolf call from the deep ravine.
It’s gone time I bike out to see Riverman, he always grounds me.
for the house, handmade, red dust on your fingertips as you pick them up. No Brexit build shortages here, this is a joint-stock world with walls from all quarters, long as they stand. From Marston to Maastricht.
grinding the beans. Tea and breakfast for the family. To town on errands and then I climb the scaffold to sand and paint the fascias. Lot of wood up there. Between coats, chat with the neighbours and drag a rent branch from the middle of the street and lay it in our skip, civic duty done. Then a long shower and a glass of Carmenere and some Haggard – She – or Coward Peace in Our Time, the books moving up in the tottering bedside pile, shrapnel working its way to the surface. And the sight of the kitchen rose, something exceptional in my allotted hours. I don’t even deserve it. Another day kicked in the ass, as Bukowski said, but I think he was about done in by then, enough repeats. It’s all in the glimpses, if you can open your eyes to them. I’m smiling yet. I’m still running my race.
won’t let you go, always muttering past failings, present weaknesses. Just when I’m thinking I’ve shaken him off and go crouching ready to leap for the next wave, he lumbers out of the swelter, monstrous with scars, bolts wobbling in his neck, all the old anchoring slights and setbacks remembered. But I still slough him off, ready the old bones for another portly bound into the unknown.
my pile of rust-red bricks under the Oxon sun, just one subterranean level, access via crowbar. I don rubber gloves and affix peg to hooter, jab at blockage with stick until my eyes smart and stream from the odour released. Where is my lackey? Where my simpering toady, my lopsided hunchback with his coffin axe, my teams of chefs, minstrels and bedturners? Where my blockage-jabber? No staff for me. I am my own chairman and minion, tea maker, pencil pusher and V-wing visionary combined. I am the lone, holed boat on the Pacific slab, an army knife of blunt blades in need of oiling. I get the dirty jobs and dream of the others. But life warrants life’s troubles, and the view of the skies after the pit is more than enough reward.
I can’t reason with the wind. I can hear it in the trees, the cedar comes tapping at my study window. It wants answers and I have none.
to notice the little bush pushing through in a back corner of the enclosure. Too much rushing around to turn the branches and see the fruit. Saw them first in Mark’s garden forty years back, pocketfuls and a palm of sugar, hiding from his baffled father in the high curtain of a willow. Time in hand then, time to daydream. But roaming the garden after the day’s work is done we find them, an unexpected prize.
