Slow words in lost time
I have learned the language of the clouds, here where there is so much sky. The birds say hi, the cock of their heads a sure plea for more fat balls. Cauliflower feels like chalk on my hands. I am contained by hills, where once I looked down from great heights.
I am consumed by details. I stand in front of paintings as time drifts. Wonder how my mother mustered that troop of colours, placed them there just so, like they are about to take their leave. I read Letters to Red and my bone marrow remembers how it is to see something for the first time, though there aren’t real first times here. Just again times. Times of new angles, new light, and meeting the unheimlich as it defamiliarises this place I’m supposed to know. I can’t find the reservoir at the end of the road. I enter my sister’s world, as she types, records, reflects. I marvel at the fullness of her days, that she is so confident about what she has done. My recent past is more elusive. I listen to new music, but it tastes like old glam rock to me, the crucible I came up in. Before I even knew what it meant to make something. The thought of making something without being conscious of making something forms like plaque around me.
I read about cyborgs as the ultimate ironic symbol for a new feminism. I start a poetry class. I notice that this is the hardest I’ve ever found it to read. I want to mow the lawn. I want to see how tall the grass will grow. I want to go to Bookseller Crow. I wish the rabbits would return. I wish the Jay wasn’t a herald of predation. I want to remember a time when I didn’t just gawp out of the window.
My feet itch to run again, hands move unconsciously like I’m packing my few belongings again. I survey the slow scene of staying put. My fragmented, shattered self (the self I see now as more than a blur) looks like dusted fingerprints over the whole house. Words pile on until I can’t breath.
Free of wordvise, I extend my limbs on grass in an approximation of dancing and become the giant I can’t ignore.
Times. Apart. Singular.