Tag: liminality

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.

Garden.

Lucy

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.