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Falling & Seeing Language
The cigarette end glowed,
made tiny golden rain as she threw it to the ground.
She started to run, was late, always late
(in the book she is reading this signals narcissism)
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Wind carried a fine mist, drunken birds few across the street,
seemed like earth was opening up in unexpected ways,
trying to talk, revive an old language.
Abruptly, she fights to catch her breath, she has tripped, is falling
down
the
steps,
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moving through the air,
everything slows
down.
She recalls her early time experiments as a child.
Moving steadily to see if seconds could be stretched,
walking and looking into a mirror held
face-up to the ceiling,
floating across inverted terrains punctuated
by zero gravity lampshades, pale puffballs,
to answer the question, does being inverted alter your sense of time?
She is grateful that her parents had left her alone.
Interference in development is dangerous under certain conditions,
making fast meals like a pressure cooker.
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The catapult shifts her perspective,
she sees herself
moving across the clay blue of the sky like a tiny doll
relative to everything for miles around,
like in an opera or Victorian novel.
She had taught Dickens for many years in schools across the city,
sees that she too is a character,
ebbing and flowing at the whim of the city`s machinations
only dreaming of autonomy.
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Heart in throat,
being seen like a splash of blood against the grey sky,
wanting to be unseen, aching at who would be seeing this, the singular act of falling.
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Something pulls at her heart like the witch doctor on the jungle suspension bridge
in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom,
her heart feels like it is coming to the surface,
feels ready to leave, blushing, lavender-hued
it is bleeding sighs, bleeding that she never had a chance to visit the Venice Biennale,
to learn to paint, wear dungarees for a year, to sip tea with toasted almonds like
in the great French books.
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Who would hold this muscle in their clenched fist?
Or, to whom would she make a donation of it?
Conrad for his Heart of Darkness
Or the mute boy on the Reading train when she was fifteen
Or her friend who was made entirely of music and ether
Or her mentor who taught her to see the interdependence of everything
like some sort of Greek oracle?
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She could even see inside of the heart, the glimmering muscle,
the power,
the necessary order of transit through the chambers, the flush.
Heart has memory. Transplant recipients have new life and
harbour old life too,
another life within their own. How companionable perhaps.
The heart as motif, I will wear my heart upon my sleeve - the
bard as oracle or life-coach.
The Queen of Hearts, that’s what she had been.
Nothing lofty or extraordinary, except that kindness is the best
magic her mother had always said.
The best magic for what?
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She feels strings vibrating all over her body - some of silk,
others more like hessian, coarse, pulling her in all directions, she is trussed up.
The strings are accountable for the distortion of time and she thinks
she sees an albatross, an echo of the Ancient Mariner.
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No filmic series flashing before her, this is a messy collage,
no - not even that - this is a becoming of all things. A resting place of being.
A keeping of everything in mind, alive and humming.
Spent her whole life searching for this to find it loitering at the exit...
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Flying, soaring high about the Zoroastrian moment,
with joy - feels like bursting, finds she is laughing, the colours around her
pulse fresh of the surface of trees, sky, heart.
It is raining luck.
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Here is her daughter coming into focus,
their conversation is faster than a heartbeat, elastic, shining,
starts with apology.
At this opening there are hailstones
droplets in her voice condensing in thick sky and bouncing,
hard, to her sister, for being so absent and distracted,
to her partner for being irritable with his habits
even to Dog for not walking her in the rain
and many, many more sorrys in ice, bouncing all over
the pavement
off...
