quarter sawn oak, expensive, wasteful and tricky. But you get the waves and rays. The creative figure. The flair. It’s the most stable timber, won’t cup or split, can’t change it’s grain. And iron hard. I’ve got three planks of quarter sawn for my tabletop, and there I’ll sit to toast Noel.
in the Aeneid or If I Die in a Combat Zone that isn’t forsworn before the last pages. You can’t write on hate, it’s a false energy. No great books are full of hate, it cheapens. Negative prose is all parlour tricks. Watch the great writers step around it. I walk out into the night-press mists and dream of words and legends, ships closing on the coast, guides waiting at dawn to climb the mountain, humble souls never speaking out against friends or family. Step on.
for sun today, dark on waking, dark as I prepare my last coffee of the day. Murk dirt-white as the steam in Furnas, colour of the sea off Rif, watching the snowfall from the hot tub. Murk dark as the inside of a cow, Twain’s tales from the prairie. Murk of receipts and ledgers, the bescarfed clerk’s dribbling nose. Murk of Mega-City One’s lower levels, of the dust kicked up in Lucky Luke’s Ghost Town. I hide in books and chip away at tasks. I’ll ride the boats in, battle for the beach and then stretch out in the headland grass. Surface skimmer, strip away my cares.
still, is the wind of change not yet blown out? Are we forever coming to terms? But I remember Punk and duck and cover mockery in the nuclear anxiety age, power cuts and Blair Peach and families renting their tvs from shops on the high street. I remember RAF roundel t-shirts and Noel’s Union Jack guitar. Empire regret feels tired now. So is it the fall of the West? Is it labour prices and the robot threat, AI writing our Christmas card poesy and driving the bus? They’re still building mirrored towers and investing in my town, the uni must bring in more money than all the real-stuff making hereabouts. But people seem nervy and out of hope. I look on, musing, trying not to feel like I’m to blame for everything.
hoping I’ll get smarter, wiser, forge some kind of personal alchemy. The Cantos have been shelf-exiled for years, since I was out in the lagoon, but I’ve picked them up again, bought other books that might give me clues to the Ezra riddle. And as with pages ventured I seek out new city tracks to wander, and the city repays. I found the silver ash and crown, hope yet when people will dream and build and drape a tree with words.
reopens soon, will sweep me back out to the cows and puddle lakes, my life coursings determined by the chance turn of civic water gates. Months gone by and I haven’t walked up by Riverman’s mooring. I’ll take him a transpontine gift, mud-splattered and ice-cold, aslant in my technical jacket poacher pocket.
are fields and fake grass pitches, darker stretches beyond where they argue about new housing estates, badger culls and long lane potholes. What would Newman have made of the court juxtaposition, my poor boy gallery walk? He’s up in town but I can’t deal with the RA crowds, the polite shuffling and the hum of all those lungs and throbbing gristle and I’m not hip or rich enough for a private view invite. I saw the work twenty years back, when my eyes were young and nobody bar students, teachers and afternoon drifters visited art galleries. I’ll coast on my hazy memories. I’ll find some silent, lonely spot in the stands and gaze at the zips.
and who can say what manner of beast haunts the outer dark, just beyond my fire bowl glow? Pull the creaky garden furniture closer and hug the smoke.
we leave a park track and he rests his bike up by a pub door. I don’t know this part of town, have never seen this boozer. City is different for all of us.
Day’s road ends, says Riverman.
calling out their reports. It’s never too thick to see your feet in Oxford town, it hangs back, shrouding the street corners and gables. In Valparaiso it covers the Pacific out to the horizon and from the high town you can’t see the market and streets below, the ascensors rising out of the white foamy air, sea beasts breaching. Only half awake I stumble out to do my messages.
