During cyclone season, family-run hostels and cafés close. I ready my summer kitchen for an intrusion. I read the sky. The dinner table glows. I finger the waratah bouquet which splays its crimson wound across the steel tray where, as sedimentary, oils and seasonings clump at the bottom of the cruet. The table hosts five wooden chairs, stiff and stalwart above five-ironstone bowls. The room waits, as if for a banquet, a series of guests. And already the guests, an omen, ease into the sea. Their ships trace the waves and like a seance in reverse, the dead call me into their terrain: pastures, plains, vesper points at sunset. The blotted moon hides in the gum trees. The acacia hiss in the wind.
My skin is salt-fresh and gloss, as I sit on the veranda under the portrait of Black Madonna and sip coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Nothing but drink inside me, a hot dark. I smell my own breath, the sip of Eastertide, the coffee— a heavy wet upon my front tooth.
Sometimes I believe in restrictions, feel them bodily with ease, an undying— a heaviness, awkward, internalized and without spirit. I look out across the lane to an empty field and imagine what existed the hour before or the hour after.
It begins to rain. And as it begins to rain, I dream of speaking the language of insurrection, the language of billy buttons and peated whisky. Or was it the language of futility, or fertility, of orchids, a ripe progeny of sensitivity and pride. As if the Madonna’s half-closed eyes pierce a crack in the decking where, up from dust, she bade a storm, an infinite trap of detritus and light swirl in the breeze. The earth lifts and the outer walls of the house exhale. The house whispers. The salt washed Madonna continues to stare. A state of drowsing and dream, and in dream I see the boy I used to talk to. One could say anything to him. He was kind. But I was ill suited in the dream to form a protection. He came into my mind as if walking into the room last year at Christmas. I was not eating. I was tired. I was exhausted by the balance of chances for moving to closure which were equally balanced by the chances of retribution. Cardinal red-dye splatters an outline of his body on the sidewalk. His forearm lies flat among the black maple leaves. The cement bruises. A delicate thing, his opaque shadow stretches out like a pennant. In tenderness, his small arm arches over the road and into the grass. Immovable I stood within a spindle of pine, snow’s aura, like steam, fell around us. Dedicated to eradicate myself, a self-eradication as dedication, I think of this boy, this boy in a small frame, who builds a space for his own courage. The boy died after crashing on a scooter. I wanted him to talk. I wanted to accept the agony of certain origins, to trust these immortal losses and take no pity into his new terrain. His brief life, a headline years before the whole community began riding rental scooters along the Esplanade. I remember the boy. The rain continues.
Now through rain-sodden grasses I make a clinical descent straight down to the riverbank toward the slip. The harbor ships bob in the rising tide. I follow the same path marked by a fisherwoman as she holds her infant and wades out to sea. I consider how to describe my intuition for her ghost. It’s as if her body is held within a camera. Her body, held in the view-lens, adheres to a glass rectangle in a windowless state of observation. A streak of cobalt among the grey clouds and my orientation to light lead me. The skin of her nose is porous and translucent. She looks at me but doesn’t see me. I step away from her. I step away from her and ease myself. Exiting on to the beach, the old stone fish traps were like little mutinies ready to contain my body–an afterglow on the sand was the opposite of shadow. If I looked deep enough there was a window, a shaded square framed by basalt rocks, water’s reflection, a self-betrayal. Through the window I, or a ghost, might glimpse the hallowed square of a room’s empty covenant. An aquatic leakage, like a porcelain bowl, the room an empty sea, walls glowing in ceramic light. It is an unearthly angle both clean and blue, unresolved by either the surface or the basin. When I looked into the water’s reflection, I could see that I would never quite hold the same spark as I once did when everyone was still alive. I was never hesitant to talk about the betrayal, the names that were mine and not mine travelled through the body. The first and the last sparrow bled on St Stephens spear. Trust, not trust. A consequence: genesis as lamentation. The exodus confused me, but that was before the possibility. Now the landscape revealed its patterned language.
To immerse myself in something holy, is to succumb to a still point in the progression. The wind only shifts the humidity here. Relief is a rare and muted state in which the heat erodes the air and reduces us to thirst. So we might sip the arid water, acrid and dry on the lips.
The dead speak without convention. I hold close their burnings, the acidic taste of lemon seed and chalk. Yes, they speak from the afterlife and from the afterlife they speak through me.
I always repented the good behaviour of others, the polite exchanges, cordiality, repelled by what I lacked, and I laughed to myself when I thought of my own astonishment at the repulsion. As if laughing at a lie, unable to discern which actions were more honest, or less deceptive, or outright neither a truth nor a lie… some fragility that not been considered; accumulation, sunlight…
The house that spring felt small and looming. The humidity broke my mouth open with saline. I drank each word under the hollow eye of a mounted sailfish. A book of seaweed specimens stood in the cabinet like a thieving animal.
It was midnight. After the storm.
By the end of two decades on earth, the child’s mother has been patient. His accidental death from riding on a scooter, now a headline that passes.
Certain truths are found in the archives, the bronze river waters, the silt at the bottom of a coffee cup.
I’ve not reacted to his death, but am persuaded by despair.
It was a new century now.
In my dreams that night a child sat at the edge of the rock pool. I swam back and forth against the falls. I surfaced. He appeared. He disappeared. Once when he vanished, I dove under the water. I felt a tug at my ankle. I reached for what I thought was his hand. I felt rock. Resurfacing. And diving. And his face. In and out. A sunlit clearing. A group of people pull me back across the water with a long branch. At the centre of the pool, lungs swollen with water, the boy, the deepest water, his stomach distended. Waters risen.
A body is driftwood. Sweat enters the marrow. Fast waters, not so long from the track, are a view, a distortion. The surface looked calm.
But when you feel this way, I say to the kid when he says he wants to kill himself, when the waters run out and the bottom of the pool is another accident scene, a car crash and a group of his friends dead on impact. He, the driver, steered the dips beneath and over again in clockwise rotation, over-corrections, the vehicles weight rotated and shifted, side swiping a traffic pole and then flipping. Passengers in the projections. A delayed breath. Torn from earth. Sky ripped from weather. Roadway. Airborne speed, watercourse… there is a way through. The sky was overcast, but the bitumen in good condition. The bollards lined the street in an even margin. The dual carriageway, wide and free of traffic on both sides, offer the expository in both directions. Undue witness, now sirens and lights eject up from the turbulent brook. There are messages broken all through the stream, protections, and overgrowth of palm fronds. There is a relational pathway between the unworn seatbelts, flush against the seat, the speed at impact, the number of times the stolen car rolled.
In one version this imperfect happenstance strikes a want to die. Force made of disorder. A lack of alignment with the world. Manslaughter, but he was only fifteen. One doesn’t see a man, but a wounded face among the material intensities—the water, my window. His brow fades in the wellspring. A gurgle and murmur among the rocks. The nature of questions and answers. Incurious impasse. As usual, the water’s swell.
I see his mother lay on the ground in the grass. I lean over her ear. I whisper get up. Because it happened in this dream and in the exchange at the delta, my tendencies scaled to shadow. I wondered if she was drunk at midday, falling upward in this mercurial crevasse, an eclipse beneath the rumbling currents. The wind in her eye. The error, now stillness. The air advancing, bubbling into the spiritual realm, a new discourse, spontaneous gasp, a blur and a blurring the nameless, faceless women.
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