So the magpie swept up to his high branch, wings buffeted by the warm summer gusts. His tree grew old and tall at the top of the cutting, at its very edge, where the little cliff of scraggly bushes dropped suddenly down to the four sets of tracks and the log yard. It was a pale, silvery gum, straight-trunked with few branches, each one sturdy and clustered with large, long, thin leaves that shifted in colour from apple green in youth to faded bottle in middle-age and to a palette of spotted purples and greys as they grew ready to fall. Along with its dry leaves, it dropped unusually large gumnuts that, falling from a great height, cracked and spilled seeds that went scuttling over the pavement. The magpie had seen many trains pass on the tracks below him, but the gumtree in its long lifetime had seen many more. The tree had heard many voices, and wondered many things. Chief among its thoughts at that moment was an attempt to comfortably explain the growing nagging sensation it felt of some mounting, rumbling energy in the air. Had the world become faster, these trains more frequent, or was it the tree that had slowed?
2016. / Rise.
A place of fleeting shallows,
of waters rising roughly with the tides,
and shortly draining all away.
Where notions rise as bottles on a pollute sea,
and are tossed about on wavelengths,
let loose upon the noisy air,
to fall again, silent, into the water.
A time of rising disbelief,
leaving warships of old glory-stripped,
their hulls bored through beneath our vision,
to sink under their mutiny.
When a whispered word means more
than a thousand voices pounding on the sky
in thunderclaps of protest.
A world of red-lit nights,
the falling sun casting colours on the sea,
and making shadows for their working.
Where lightening rises from the ground,
to spread its violence to the cloud,
pierces through, and the rain brought tumbling
tastes of acid on the tongue.
A time of desperate villains, desperate men,
whose desperation breeds contempt for laws of nature,
and plants the seeds of lies, to rise
as lofty trees, fed pesticides and time.
When calls for justice are lost into the air,
made quiet in the rising roar, the winds,
and in the winds the voices melt,
and all hands are lost at sea.
Being in Float.
driftwood
left stranded
then dampened by the tide
caught
by rising waters
and wrested from the shore
flotsam
and now floating
and buoyed by gentle waves
drifting
on the surface
just above the undertow
eddied
drawn in circles
and deftly swept away
stranded
by the currents
on the shoreline once again
Garden.
We wove some magic here.
Deckled trees with fairy dust—
the figments of our imaginations drew lines
between the sky
between the leaves
between the earth.
A white butterfly
—wandered, onward, captain of our fairy band—
buffeted by the breeze
took flight
and glittered flicking wings
into the sunlight.
He was like our memory
—allied and squandered to the air—
a captain captive to the passing currents
at rest on tides of drifting listlessness
buoyed on waves of sound—loud
reverbed from the earth itself
and beneath the ground dispersed to nothing but vibrations.
Caws of magpie on the branches of trees
beyond the fence-lines
called insistent, echoed
and, in flight, drew ever more away.
We left a fish adrift on the wall
—light-flicker, silver scales in the sun—
to tinker with our senses
breaking beams against one another in refraction
into parts.
We played colour against cousin
and deployed in every gesture of design
a symmetry of power in all things that’s mirrored
in perfection
by the most broken shook-up thoughts of early morning
when night’s break seems to slumber
beyond the restless sleepless soul.
Little carrions of life
—bearing sunshine as they went
light caught white upon their tiny wings—
darted, tumbled, climbed and flew
their circus one of circles through the sky
an endless repetition of their patterns
that went on gently till the nightfall.
We saw every tiny thing alight
—their edges made their edges
and at once made melting edge-to-edge—
their glimmered rims glimpsed through lashes
looked-at sideways
caught in sketches from the doorways
of the moments
only half-here and half-now.
Sky-shimmers, the lineaments
copied in colour to our files and stored in footloose memory
to make the fodder of our dreams
when distorted
cards shuffled
and re-drawn upon the pages of imagination sleeping.
We weave some magic here
sleeping awake
in day-dreaming
in slow reading
of the air.
Awake.
and in the darkness
in the most-slept moments
the deepest rumbles pass
Spires in the Evening.
Choral voices pierced the ceiling of the sky.
Times Between.
in the long silences
—the spaces—
traced in silver trails traversed
those moments
of long looking
in silence
and with thought dispersed
these spaces
of sensation
colliding with a world inverse
the moments
worn as fragments
fracture
and in time reverse
One Ghost Crept In.
Silently, he sidled up, to speak to me of his death.
He stepped into my inattention, my rapt, lost, quiet moment, empty of all thought, anchored in this place—he stepped in through an open door.
Silently, I greeted him.
He spoke quietly, but somehow, not in words, and told me—of the cold, and slipping, of the body drawn, and stopping. Told me—of his heart, raced-heartbeat, its reaching, its long-slow,
and stopping.
He told me—why.
As I listened, the weak sunlit sky of day was made all dark. I saw the spotlights’ circles flash and search, their beams made crossed swords clashing. I heard the rain that made the river rise to meet the sky, made water of the air, and suffocated the swimmer’s breath. I too was drawn, lost in liminal spaces, not in time, but drawn, and drowning. Before us ran the river; beneath our feet and at our backs grey stone drew closer, tighter, rain-wet and black, spotlight-flashed.
Silently, I listened.
He told me—of setting Westward stroke, night fallen, of swimming through the dark. I heard the siren stir; the blood in me was pulsed. He told me—or was it that I heard them?—of bullets cutting course through water. Told me—
this is where I died.
From the door, left ajar, cold breeze whispered, made ice of bones, deep-seeping under skin.
And silently,
still, the river ran.
It was a very New York story.
The subway was fetid with humidity. Taking the detour uptown to change my clothes had been a wasted effort. A dark patch already flourished at the armpit I had to raise to reach the overhead holds as I rode the train back down to the East Village; by the time I made it to the top of the exit stairway sweat clung to the skin of my stomach and grabbed stickily at my shirt.
Emerging onto Essex Street was barely a relief. A solid bank of dark clouds lowered the ceiling of the sky, and there was no breeze besides the cool flow of air-con escaping from shop doors.
It was a regulars-welcome kind of bar, oblong and small. The kind of bar where the very arrangement of the furniture encouraged either solitude or intimacy. It was a lovers-and-loners kind of bar.
We had the place to ourselves for a few hours. It was still the afternoon; the bar hadn’t got going yet. He poured them, and I drank. Memory licked at the edges of the picture, thick and sweet as the blueberry-flavoured liqueur in my glass.
A bar for lovers and loners. But which one was I?
Words.
What matters is not their matter, but that they matter still.
Magical: Day One 