Author: Lucy

Below-waves.

Lucy

Dipping my head below the surface, I will get my hair well wet this time. I will kick from the rock with hardened feet, surge under, and follow the forms I find there. I will trust that I can breathe beneath the surface, where surely I have breathed before.

Down there, the waves of the sea’s weathered surface are but a distant hum; it’s the surface that’s the shadow in a world that’s upside-down. Though muffled from the maddening crowd and sheltered from the storm, the under-sea is not serenely silent, though in its widest-reaching pockets where there are but specks of dust I expect I will seem to be alone.

But below-waves is populated by monsters of the metaphoric deep, all swimming about and moving about in a miasma of myth and its raw matter, the recycled stories of life. A whale, its wide mouth oblivious, merely passing through the soup, will scoop me up – the ambivalence of fate has chosen me to fall.

Once swallowed by the whale, spat out, made formless and reformed, I will drift towards the surface once again, borne by the colder currents, restless, underneath. Slowly, as the sunlight filters ever brighter through the swirl of thought and memory and with the creatures of the ‘tween-space passing through, I will unfurl, and there dwell, drifting, tethered to the deep, in the sunlit submerged kelp-farms of the sea.

Here in this almost-place, I will grow until I am ready to drift free – it is a place of plenty, of filtered sunlight, of sheltered shade, where life abounds and takes on strange shapes, forming shoals that shimmy and shiver together as organic cosmic disco-balls. This is not the place of strangeness but one where strangers come to stay. A realm of in-betweens and not-quites, where a lamp caught in the mirror is reflective of it all.

Listening Meditation.

Lucy 
Birds overhead
 and the rain sweeping violently over the roof in sprays
 snatched by the winds and torn away
 then lashed on the rooftops again.
 Birds fly over
 giggling 
 and calling as they pass.
 The cat doesn’t like it.
 Meows
 a startled birdish chirrup
 and jogs over to me.
 In the left ear
 gas burning
 in muted and droning roar.
 To the right
 the rain dashed on the window glass
 spittered
 closer than the swirling roar inside the walls 
 beneath the ceiling.
 Birds call overhead
 again
 these screeching and squarked calls
 bickering as they go.
 Now footsteps 
 in another house’s hallway
 (though there’s nobody home)
 thumping
 they vibrate through the floorboards
 and rumble
 in the floors.
 No voices
 only the birds calling and bickering
 and giggling 
 as they go.

After Sunfall.

Lucy

Up above, from tall, invisible trees, two birds call-and-answered in delicate, dawn-like song. There was a crisp freshness to the air that like the birds spoke of morning. The sky was the shade of holiday-beginnings — of taxis caught under early-morning skies. On this topsy-turvy day, tilting at the turn of the seasons, I could almost smell the blossom promised by the bare, sticky branches of the neat street-trees. Their austere nude winter limbs were soon to be transformed into fleeting beauties, dressed in sweet pink tulle, white lace, and glinting emerald buds. In the garden, winter-blooming bulbs perfumed the air, sweet and cloying. They’d pushed themselves inevitably onwards, upwards, through the soil and the old weathered wood-chips and the nights’ frosts. I’d watched them growing, determined and mysterious, and wondered who had planted them and how long ago. Once close enough to the sun they sprung into tight white clusters of pretty, simple flowers and bravely sang of spring while the winter raindrops clung coldly to the air.

Ghost, circa 1882.

Lucy 
 Where to, miss? 
 the air whispered
 the horses’ bells peeled by the winds
 jingling, the horses ready to leave
 I turned my neck a little
 to see if they were there—
 was I ready for a ride?
 —but the driver had already turned away
 leaving kicked-up dust
 of moon-smoke in his wake.

Weather Turning.

Lucy

The wisteria had completely died away for the winter and was now just a mess of bare, stick-like tendrils grasping to the house. But other flowers had been more stubborn – the roses were still bravely opening new flirtatious buds into the cold and the lavender trees, neat and thick, stood staunchly. The summer-dried and now rain-soaked leaves smelt like French fields, sun-drenched and stretching out flat beneath a low, blue sky. It seemed some hasty gardener had been through the bushes, for the path was strewn with freshly clipped lavender branches and scattered flower-heads. They and the cut ends of the tree’s branches were leaking fragrance into the air and infusing the raindrops with oil. The rain broke-up the air willy-nilly so that I caught the scent only in quick snatches before it was washed or wind-blown away. As I walked down the path the cat-scratches on the backs of my hands brushed against the bristle-like dead-heads and stung, risen and puffed, in fine slivers of pink through almost translucent skin.