A budding writer b a s k s through the four seasons…
A selection from the 2024 web log, On Being Alive:
COOL
I tip my hat to that, to the cashier, a first fifteen, who held the pack of sanitary pads as though it were just another grocery item while reading me my total, before finding room for it in the bags.
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MATTE FOIL
weeding in the shade
a spent seed packet unearthed
foil in the torn grass
contraception lookalike
which is so hugely ironic
–
SYNTHESIS
You are Infinite Life. You’re good craic. Whaea surrounded by public servants, “This richness,” her hands inflected on herself.
Those guys I wouldn’t be the foster parent to. One broke down and I encouraged him to. Screaming at me in the dark, shrieking in his street cred.
–
FLIGHT
One morning, I up end a bag of soil into one of the pits I’ve dug, a pit to plant a blueberry.
Torch says of the soil, “That’s dead people, Mum.”
“Hey?” I wipe my brow. “No. This soil’s from the shop. It’s not from the cemetery.” [FYI we have never taken soil from the cemetery.]
We pull the stiff, garden soil back over the holes, cosy the blueberries. I remember pavers hidden under the fuchsia and set them between the shrubs. Cleo steps across them, weighing a watering can. She waters the plants. Water beads off the blue leaves. Barefoot. Her placed steps dear.
A month ago, Torch jumped off the changing table and landed—Crack!—on his bed. I lifted the mattress, showed him. One of the slats had snapped in two. Even so, launching will not been outlawed.
Last night Cleo and Torch used my bed and the side table to step onto the windowsill, naked in the golden, setting sunlight, tethering themselves by fingertip to the open window levers before launching onto the bed, squealing, play fighting. Torch yells against pinching, “No! Cleo!” Having stripped the bed of blankets, Cleo’s flushed. She tucks her head in her shoulder, takes a breather, reproves herself adoringly, “No, Cleo.” She falls on herself like snow. [As though] her brother’s said quite a line, good craic, happiest thing in the world.
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BASIC HOSPITALITY, SUMMER EVENING
I lift down glasses for the hazy ale my neighbour brought, my neighbour, his wife, their infants. “I feel rude, inviting you round without offering you ecstasy.”
He stammers, “Oh, don’t feel bad.”
–
TEXTURAL HIGHLIGHTS OF A HOUSEKEEPER’S MORNING
the clack and clatter of little wooden sticks, collecting them back into their chiffon bag
thick, plastic felts almost juicy in their pencil case
warmth of the black door handle, the door to the deck
easy turn of the brushed steel doorknob
difficult dip of the old door handle to the lounge, screws jutting out, too long before it engages, it engages just: this too is a textural highlight when she’s feeling in for it / in for feeling it
–
SOARING OVER RUBBLE
That mineral creek smell this morning, creek in forest smell, here on the moss lawn by the shrub grown through plastic canvas, that lifted soil smell, here above the fog hidden ocean, dry dirt smell, fungal, the dozen types of and names for soil in the māra book.
Volavo feels strange in the mouth – volevo ‘I was wanting’ is easy, usual but volavo ‘I was flying’ , it was the first time I’d uttered that.
The afterlife is not a hypothesis. And we don’t always live it after life: sleeping is living the afterlife during the lifetime. Last night Cleo wet the bed and slept on. I woke at 4am, stripped off my wet satin pyjamas, dressed, read, fell into the spare bed at five.
Flying. We don’t intuit or foretaste the afterlife; we live it. People we love hold us. Or let us go. We cruise over their broken-down childhood ramparts, boulevards in ruins, pursued by Justice, but invincible, fleet in the air even if the ceiling of the dream keeps us low.
Fog blows up the street.
The Fabergé egg of a seasonal worker opening his childhood home to you. The love interest owning his roots his humble origins his all that he’s put behind him the conditioning she’s tangled threads worked out.
On a stone wall, I name this joy and count in my counting house the friends and lovers who have shared their rural delivery with me then I realise one of them speaks the secret language I had chanted in.
My daughter’s voice breaks through and I hoist open an eye, cement thick in my body. When she pulls me into the for breakfast, gravity has its old way with us. I step onto the deck, greet the fog, sink.
Volavo, I mouth, biking Cleo to kindy. I was flying. I went where I wanted, soared over the bridges I’d burned, floated, saluted Valtellina, shot through, drifted, landed, slipped away.
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HANG THE POOR BASTARD
A handyman walks around my house, tapping the supporting beams.
I focus on one potential spot and ask him, “How much pathos can these walls hold?”
A few days ago, my brother was ready to pay me for editing part of his thesis. He sent me a link to his dealer. “Ignore the prices,” he said. “Choose a painting. I’ll bring it down.”
I was dumbfounded.
When I unveiled it for my family, my mother winced. She sucked air, like she’d been hit.
It is an intense painting. A portrait of my late uncle (I’m not allowed to call it a portrait. My brother doesn’t even call his work figurative. Abstract, he says), my late actor uncle wrung out, delivering tragic lines, the sweat cooling on his jowl, exhausted, magnificent.
Mum winced – I’d made a poor choice, the painting would be unliveable, it would drain the life from my house. Mum wasn’t wrong about one of those things. Except there was no choice – all Jack’s paintings are intense. There is only an intense Jack panting: he did his time hocking fruit bowls and bullfights along Las Ramblas when he worked in Barcelona. That was what he had to paint to get by. Tomatoes et all. Now, intense ‘abstracts’ are what Life wants from him. Intense, driving lifeforce.
Where do you hang that?
–
EXPAND
I was ashamed of the colonial granny’s bonnets I inherited with this plot.
Then a friend tilted up the chin of one and said, What colour.
Now I study the pink, horned petals, star-wide, stretching back, and I call them columbine.
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PRIMAL SCREAM
At night in the car, roars, “Of all the money that e’er I had, I spent it in good company.” Grips steering wheel. “And of all the harm I e’er have done, alas I did to none but me.” Lowers pitch yet again, resonance chamber. “Come fill to me the parting glass…” Furnishes a few vulgar verses. Alto baritone bass about it.
–
OILING PARSNIPS
Stirring raw parsnips in oil with my late great aunt’s tarnished spoon
fashions have changed
(that’s what they do)
roasting veges in muggy weather
slipping the wooden chock under the front door with your foot
is also a thing
–
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
On a road trip to Serbia, a decade back, drawing in sharp ballpoint on Mike’s arm felt too in-joke in the back seat with another traveller there. Mike who liked girls touching him or who liked my drawing? Tension: didn’t say ‘that hurts’, didn’t say ‘keep going’. Mike who picked up a stray dog while hitchhiking to reach us (or stole a dog). Mike who by a pond in Delft called me Miss New Zealand which was so problematic I was free to later sleep with him. Mike who alarmed me by remembering my nine childhood names one morning along a river in Ghent. I had to stop sleeping with him. That Mike. Could I draw on his arm or not? I won’t offer to draw on the third traveller in the back seat, it’s obviously a flirty thing, but, I look out at the sea to our left, it’s also a summer of love close quarters branding my stud labelling my clothing honeyskin nursing an overdog instead of an underdog thing. But aside from his warm build, petulance, hedonism he was a patient mediator when the group frayed out.
He was so wrong for me. I possum-hissed at him.
I had no relationships and my relationships were meaningful.
He had continual girlfriends.
Mike a friend of a friend, and that friend’s crew who I met all of us lounging naked at some river in the Netherlands with no romantic sentiment yet just prickling with the plainness of autonomy.
–
ACCIDENTS OF THE POSSIBLE
Basking, three beers in, in dangling my bare foot; sat on the fence chatting with my neighbours as the evening grew cold last night; collective children across in my home, a fennel one neighbour had grown at the sock-sandalled foot of another; another cracking his knuckles and later warming his arms, impersonating the crank he’d taken to task at a meeting last night, taken him to task over youths not signing up for the trades, he pitched his hand, these guys grow up in a boom and then they blame phones on few kids entering the sector. There isn’t the demand there was. He looks at the ground. Besides, technology is the most useful tool! he let them know, where else can you find out how to fix anything, there and then? This neighbour still has his tradie forearms, masses I inwardly appreciate, but he complains he’s out of shape from the new desk job. We drift onto music. They name bands, songs, venues.
“Music must be the one of the more precise ways to date generations,” I say. “Top hits.” The four of us are staggered across the 1980s.
“Or world events,” Forearms says.
–
TRACKS IN THE SNOW
To tell this story I have to admit to taking the lower road, to taking that virtual short-cut to sight past lovers which is not something a person does when they’re at their best but which is perhaps more common than I realise, I’m thinking of when my poet friend said to me years ago, walking around Hare Island, as though it were hypothetical, “Say I had Googled you,” and he spontaneously laughed.
As I said, to tell the following story, I have to admit to taking that lower road.
So here goes.
I forget my father, not having a phone of his own, is sharing mine while he’s living with me these three months.
This morning I got up, opened my phone and noticed ‘Israel Gaza Conflict’ on my searches above three male names—one with two spellings (I shrug, no one’s an angel). No big deal. Dad was researching current affairs last night. I laugh because I don’t have to cover my tracks with him.
–
IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT GLASS
Glass is always going on about light.
–
PROMISE: SHOWER, JERSEY, HEAT PUMP
When I’m cold, dropping down a steep hill on my bike in the spring sun—under-dressed but bad mouthing the southern climate—I say aloud, “I am warm every single day,” and it is true and it makes me feel better.
–
WRIST GRIP
Here’s to the girlfriends, for your windshells, forbearance and sass.
Here’s to the minxes, for your new energy and mystique.
Here’s to the boyfriends, for your worshipping us and your hard yards.
Here’s to the toy boys, for your fuckssake and your taking bliss in your stride.
–
WALTZ
Outside in the weak winter light
my mother trims my father’s beard
he with his large hand holding his collar flush
she with her elbows high
the earth revolving, whiskers drift southwest
chilled towels ripple on the line
–
STAIRWELL
“It’s meant to be,” I say, hiding the treasure under my hands.
“It’s meant to beeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” I say, falling out of my colleague’s life.
–
THE END OF THE WORLD
I join a colleague on the second floor.
“There were some girls sniffing glue in the bathroom,” she whispers.
“Today?” I stack a pile of DVDs on her desk.
“I went in and found plastic bags. It stank. I told the admin.” She looks over her shoulder down to the admin room, now closed for the evening, then continues her story. “’They asked me if it smelt like glue.” She smiles to herself, thinking of her younger days. “I couldn’t remember.”
I crouch to lift a book from my lower trolley. “It’s been a long winter.”
“A long winter, yes. But couldn’t they get any marijuana?” She laughs. “It’s better for you.”
Later, my manager gives me the same heads up.
“There were some girls in earlier. So if you see them going into the bathroom, just bowl in there. One was quite sick.” She grimaces, but she doesn’t judge. “It’s sad. I wish they wouldn’t do that. I mean-” hugging her folders against her pinstripe suit, she pouts and looks at me, her terracotta lipstick- “it’s so bad for them.”
–
AUTOPILOT INCLUSION
At the kitchen table one afternoon with our daughters, my neighbour’s explaining to my father where his wife’s from. “Do you know Nagoya?”
“Can’t say I’ve heard of it.” Dad scratches his neck. Geography’s usually his strong point.
“Forth biggest city in Japan.” My neighbour puts down the playdough he’s been absently modelling and turns to lift his hand into the air, to sketch us a map. Then he does something subtle and marvellous, almost undetectable. His air map would have crossed my face. He turns further from the table and begins his map anew in the air crossing in front of the back door instead, “Here’s Tokyo,” and he and my father and I all look as though at the back door but actually at a coherent map of Japan.
–
CONFIDE
Basking in my friend saying, at his going away party, “Cleo is my hero. She’s fearless.” My friend being a person who wouldn’t say this primarily to make me smile but in simple honesty. Cleo is his hero, launching herself off the stage—adults run in that brief warning where she bends her knees—or lying on a skateboard, propelling herself across the town hall floor like a stingray, or copying the older kids and sliding head first—“Not head first, Cleo!”—down the halfpipe.
“She is fearless. But she’s coordinated. Independent, that girl,” I say, diluting my friend’s testimony. Basking in his inner security. What’s that thing you say when a male wears pink? Or when he stands there a little worn out, wearing his sailor shirt, eyes glowing, deeply present, and owns his formative influence to be one—I look around for her—one two year old kid.
–
HER SILKY BLONDE HAIR WITH ONE WEARY, FLAT KNOT SMALLER THAN MY FINGERTIP
The days pass in a blur of nursing, feeding, dressing and toileting my daughter and when she plays wishing she needed me.
“Sit down,” she says as she’s working on a puzzle, patting the chair beside her.
I almost choke on my happiness.
–
WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING?
Oh. I work myself into a state over non-existent love affairs. I don’t make a living from it.
An excellent life. I kiss my fingers.
–
ONION GRASS or
THIS IS WHERE I CAME WITH OTHER REBELS
Striding down a hill in Koputai
back to my daughter
(I have the car keys in my pocket
she’s napping in the car,
the farther I am from her
the farther the keys from her)
I double back to
an orange blossom drenched in rain
hold my nose up to a bloom
inhale its sweetness, now on
my cheek drops of water from the bloom
as I stride towards the ocean car park
one rolls down my cheek
telling me of
the lovesickness I hadn’t allowed myself
a surrogate tear
cool down my cheek
–
ARTISTRY
Basking in wearing the ring my husband made me. I slide it onto my finger. Silver, it catches overcast light best, and there’s plenty of foul weather in this territory.
–
NOT WANTING WHAT THE LEAST CANNOT HAVE
[GHANDI’S PRECEPT]
I want to make peace with my parents buying almond croissants on weekdays. Why are we eating like kings? I want them to stop, because buying two almond croissants and a sausage roll from the Filipino bakery for morning tea on a Saturday and a Monday proves that we’re so rich we can do what we dream of. I say no thank you to the almond croissant. While I’m washing the dishes after lunch, I eat my half of the almond croissant.
–
‘LOOK!’ IS AN ESSENTIAL VOCABULARY IN ANY ACQUIRED LANGUAGE
Strong pink magnolia against a stone white sky. Mouse-large husks curl and dry on the footpath, the footpath lately swept clean – recent arrivals.
GLINT
“Cleo?” I call for my daughter in the greenhouse.
I haven’t seen her there, bridging the fish pond, peeking at them through the railing.
We join her.
“Look at those coins.” Mum leans over the railing. “It feels wrong, doesn’t it-” she smiles- “stealing that kind of money.” The coins glint. Beside svelte fish, they reflect the whitewashed glass panes. “Like,” she pauses, “it would be really stealing.”
I nod, loving that little flame of superstition we forget my mother carries, wished-on coins being different from regular coins. You steal a wish, you carry that shit around.
–
LEN LYE
I take one of my hoop earrings from the rack by the mirror in the bathroom. The wire’s deformed, not a mathematical circle.
I shelved a kids’ book yesterday, Round Like a Circle. A sunflower on the cover and the title bothered me: there’s no such thing as a circle. A circle is a concept, not an object.
Anyway, back in the bathroom I thread a small porcelain pendant, leaf-shaped, peach coloured, with gold veins, onto the hoop. My sister-in-law made the pendant. I hook the hoop through my ear. Then I put the other earring on. I stand back. The daylight catches the gold and the gloss of the porcelain.
Kinetic.
The hoop reflects how I move my head. The pendant reflects how the hoop moves. It’s physics play.
The glass frontage of the Ministry of Social Development has been vandalised, cracked. As I approach the sliding doors, my reflection fractures.
Inside the building, as a staff member photocopies our documents, Cleo walks up to a display board, mounted on a weight on the ground, and she pushes the board. It’s heavy, it’s slow to sway. Movement tells us the weight of materials. Physics play.
–
HAIKU
the security guard eases a broken puzzle into its box
not spilling a piece
with his three and a half fingers
–
FREAKS: TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE
Basking in whispering ‘Yes!’ to a former classmate who, on seeing me at two distinct help desks in one evening over two floors of the public library, smiles and whispers in passing, ‘You’re everywhere.’ His hands in his tartan pockets, striding toward the DVD racks, bending a little to make a conspiracy of me. Our conscientious hush.
–
WITH OUR POWERS COMBINED
Basking in the pert and helpful timer on the oven. Tring. I just push a button—an overly long button, which I like, it emphasises the oven’s age, and it pretends to be more manual than digital—and red digits tally up, one minute for each push. If I hold the button down it speeds through the numbers. I release on a forty five for a cake; three minutes for skipping rope. And then I can forget! I can do what I like and the responsibility is the timer’s to remind me – to turn off the oven, to hang up the skipping rope. I delegate to the timer. The timer is my little friend.
Look at me – running around with a frilly parasol, not keeping an eye on my simmering rice, not bothering to raise my weary eyes to the clock, slumping in a patch of sun. Unsupervised simmering. I love it!
Tring.
–
PATER FAMILIAS
Basking in my father reading aloud the biography notes of short-lived Russian writers while I’m across the table from him, reading a book of my own, one that interests me. The way his voice tails off and picks up. He mumbles his delivery to safeguard against not being listened to, because it is as he is reading aloud that he is finding out whether the material is worth sharing, as it appeared to be at the beginning. It moved him in some way.
“Who is that?” I hold aside my book, not in the least interested, just refamiliarizing myself with my father’s dear propensity to spontaneously read aloud, to read aloud that is with no warning to an able and literate audience – from a tourist guide, a recipe book, an information panel, an obituary.
“Haven’t heard of him,” I say. I’m amazed my father hasn’t petered off because the biography now involves a suicide, any suicide to which my father must object on a moral level but about which he shows unexpected liberalness by voicing all the same the fact of the young Russian writer’s suicide.
“Thirty three. That is young,” I say.
–
AFTER-PARTY SHIMMER
You decide what heals you.
Your eyes hurt. You take off your glasses and sit in the staffroom watching the curtain of gold foil tassels flickering under the ventilation. You can’t focus on a single strand – light keeps jumping between them, an enchantment unlike a waterfall or snow where you can zero in on a single drop, slowing the cascade by tracking that droplet or flake. Here the tassels shimmer. Isolating a part isn’t necessary – my eyes are here for the sum and the shimmering sum heals them.
–
WINTER AFTERNOON
Basking in Cleo pulling sand over her feet, sitting at the foot of the dunes, entirely self-contained, while the boys climb up and jump or slide down.
She joins them later, she tunnels under the acacia to find them. They’re playing house. It’s tight, but she climbs in between them and sits. ‘You want to watch Hot Wheels?’ Torch passes his friend an imaginary remote. They play-watch Hot Wheels in the dunes, under the acacia bushes. Living the dream! Minutes later, Torch serves two minute noodles for dinner. ‘Hey Mum! Do you want some?’ I startle. I walk over, bend down and put out my hand. Wump. A clump of cold, damp sand pressed there. ‘Thanks! I’ll just go back over where I was, in the sun.’ Then his friend announces it to be morning: Torch dishes up Cocopops.
Out of the blue, his buddy asks me an odd question. ‘Hey Angela, do you have any metal?’
‘I don’t.’
English is his second language, so I double check. ‘You mean the shiny, hard stuff.’
‘Yes.’
Torch calls up, ‘Hey Buddy, come look at the castle.’
‘Oh yeah I’ve got some metal.’ I give him a handful of nothing.
‘Thanks.’ He grabs it from me.
–
NURTURERS GONNA NURTURE
Squirting mayonnaise on fresh, sliced bread, spreading, winding the can opener around a tin of tuna, scooping the flesh into a dessert spoon and draining the oil back into the tin, breaking off long ears of cos lettuce and cutting them to fit the bread, squaring on the lid. The final cut. Deliberating over clingfilm to make it look just so, or a used plastic bag. Rifling through the bags for a small one. Thirty minutes later, on me holding out a little baggie for the six hour bus ride ahead, En tapping his fingers together in excitement.
–
RED, BLACK, WHITE, GREEN
Every Saturday I hear chanting in the street because people want Palestinians to have a good life. Israelis too. It’s passionate chanting. They mean it. They mean it all the time and they come together and shout it on Saturdays. They’ve done this for months.
TO RELATE OR NOT TO RELATE?
That group over there. Who are they?
They’re a knitting group. They meet once a week or once a month. Do you knit?
I do. You?
I don’t. I can only do the simple knit.
(Takes off her gloves) You can make a scarf.
True. And I did! I knitted a scarf years ago from yarn I’d spun. I used a, what do you call them, a drop spindle. The rod with a hook. You wind it by hand. (I demonstrate)
(Frowns) That sounds hard. (Pauses) Did you want to feel like a medieval woman?
What? No! It was time-consuming, but relaxing.
(Admits) I’ve had a go on a spinning wheel.
Ah! You must be coordinated. The foot action, the hand dosing in the fibre. Listen, I’ll find out for you if they meet weekly or monthly.
That’s okay. We (waves her arm at a boyfriend) come into the library most Friday nights anyway. We know how to live it up.
–
VERBAL
After dropping Torch at school, walking Cleo back up the hill. She’s walking along a beam, a neighbour’s fence, and a woman’s walking towards us. In passing, she says morning, I say morning, then Cleo says minmin, taking us both by surprise. The woman lights up and Cleo smiles too but she doesn’t look at me, she looks away in a halo of dawn light.
Like when you chip in in a language no one thinks you speak.
–
A COLOUR ECHOES
Basking in feeling well walking along Tomohaka beach today, weird warm air, able to walk the length of the beach because my parents were with the children and Cleo was—I flare my nostrils with feeling, I kind of cuss this—Cleo was SO cute, holding a sea mallow up to me, its purple ringing off her drenched lilac pinafore, her pinafore not just toned with water but browned with sand, the flower and her face upturned to me, such a flower only eye-catching from the upfacing angle but then it casts beauty on anything around it.
–
CATCHABILITY
Basking in the moment (one minute into a game of catch with naked Torch, oooh yeah, on the back lawn) when Cleo gets it and breaks into a run! Arms to the sky and bumbling like a bee, she joins the game, she becomes catchable. In her dozy pajamas, she takes flight; a little match, lit. Catchability. How do you turn it on and turn it off? To get Torch to consent to boarding the car to go anywhere, I challenge him to race me to the front door and back first. First one to touch the car! And you have to not think You uncooperative shit.
When Torch says its unfair he can’t have an icecream, I disagree, but I don’t know how to reply to that. He’s ready for an icecream, he might learn to say, and that’s true.
–
KIA MANAWANUI
My midterm goal, like say within the next six months, well as soon as possible obviously, is to like people. A dustbin lid drops and clangs. Tolstoy wrote about brotherly affection. A criminologist identified a link between nutrition and aggression. Here’s a good sign – when I was falling asleep last night, I thought of my friends as blousy roses, and of their offspring as roses. I loved them all. So I think I am curing my hostility, my cruelty.
Saying that, I was angry at an Italian visitor to the library today because he wore his hair in a messy side pony and because he corrected me, ‘Oh, Lombardia,’ when I said Lombardy even though we were speaking in English as he had just said Florence, not Firenze (where he was from.) I was sickened because he blew a kiss to my colleague. And because, upon seeing our small selection of Italian books and noticing our Dantes, he said Dante opens his heart. Blegh. Furthermore, walking up the stairs, he explained he wanted a one-day membership. We don’t do those. Presuming what he knows to be how things are everywhere.
Afterwards on the ground floor, I remembered Dante to be from Florence. I was pretty sure. I righted myself, and pushed my trolley smartly. It was nice to be able to let the kid off the hook for his loyalty to Dante, at least for something.
–
COASTAL
Basking in the full moon overhead in early daylight, moon bathing, the waves that much wilder. Along the esplanade waves leap over the railing like the thief leapt over my aunty’s gate, vaulted it, shoulder high, like a leopard’s she described his lift, high on adrenaline. She was alive describing him. Paff, seawater gasps a personal best, salt spray. “Did you see that Torch!” Looks over his shoulder. “What Mum?” Will another wave breach? While I’m watching for the spray, a seagull alights on the bonnet. The pure white of his breast. I advise the children of it. We discuss whether his wing tips are black feathers and white feathers, or striped ones. Conflicting opinions on this. “Biiiird.” Cleo points. But she means it. She doesn’t blather like adults do. She’s good to her word. Whenever Cleo says ‘bird’, there’ll be a bird. She touched her head and told me ‘hat’ the other day, she said it urgently, and sure enough, we retraced our steps down the dark alley and there on the ground lay her white knitted cap. That precisely was the first moment in her nearly two years with us that her ability to speak caused an effect. One strong syllable at the right time. Frighteningly useful. Brava piccolina, my bright participant!
–
IN PASSING
Walking Torch down the hill to school. He walks with me backwards, zig zagging, while I carry Cleo and wait again for him to catch up.
“Nice morning.” A tall man, hands in pockets, zip zipped up over his chin, is overtaking us. “At least he’s independent-minded.” Nods at Torch. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Carries on ahead.
Torch catches up to me. “What did he say, Mummy?” He’s shy, flapping the backpack strap at his hip.
“He said a nice thing about you.”
–
FASCINATE ME
The utensil holder ran out of room so I stood the tongs up inside the grater, but on seeing it shortly after, that was congested, I couldn’t breathe well. So I lifted them out and, clang, they lie alongside the utensil holder, in the area of the utensil holder, a wide—but not wide enough—mouth jar. The knife lies in that area too. That’s a lot of metal: grater, tongs and knife; a lot of reflective surfaces behaving on each other. In fact the metal theme travels all the way to me on the back, or the lid I should say, of a saucepan. Texturally obstinate then, a warty, matte pumpkin and a dry, florety cauliflower. The hide of a pumpkin and the thirst of a weak cauliflower to say something else.
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AUSTERITY VS AMBIENCE
Basking in lighting a second candle. My house too can look like a nineties, velvet film. One candle is company, two’s a seance; two are a seance, three are a votive Mass; three a votive Mass, four a birthday cake. There you have it: the germinating, catastrophic and finally sparkly life-cycle of candle enumeration. Getting Cleo who’s spilled the matches to put them back in the box is another matter.
The second candle is the difference between austerity and ambience. My people are one-candle people, but I am curious about two-plus candle cultures, like India’s seems to be, and it’s said curiosity anticipates conversion. People who ‘research’.
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FLAVOUR PROFILES
Loitering in my own garden. The kale numbs my mouth, then tastes like a reprimand.
Sun chokes – mild, sweet, translucent, silky like conditioner, deflated.
–
FREE RANGE
When the driver who called En a cunt pulled over and stood in the cycle lane with his hands in fists, En jumped off his bike to meet him but carefully lowered his backpack to the ground first. The backpack carried a folded tray of 30 eggs.
He smiles and looks at the ceiling when he tells me, lip still swollen. “Only one broke.”
–
WHAKATAU
I never cry. I nearly cried at the haka to welcome my son to Tainui school this afternoon. I opened my eyes wide to distribute the emotion evenly, standing between his father and the father of another new entrant, swaying a little to the rhythm, cupping my son’s warm, woollen shoulder to reassure him. Trying not to watch too obviously the resonant middle schooler leading the chant, the one whom every kid was watching for the actions, quick on the uptake. It’s the most natural thing in the world to many kids, kapa haka. I was basking in fire.
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RISK
“Interesting. Exactly the same happens to me.” Gabriel’s quiet.
I’m complaining to my friend Gabriel that I’m un-strategic. I spend two years apiece writing novels I can’t share. Turns out Michael writes songs about people he cares about or hates. Then he makes himself put them out in the world.
“That’s good,” I say. “Then your fear doesn’t win.”
“I guess so.”
“What came of it? Your last album?”
“I talked to the people beforehand.”
His wife clarifies, “You didn’t let them censor you.”
“No. Not for them to modify it. Just for them to be aware of what I was doing.”
“And?” I gesture.
“They realised we’d fallen out a long time ago, and that I’d written the lyrics when that was fresh.” He pauses. “We all ended up in a spa pool together, actually.”
On an aside, this is the Gabriel who gifted Torch the most obnoxious electric guitar, a toy, for his birthday. We keep it in the car. It’s my rage-ometer. If I’m on edge, it’s the thing that’ll push me over. On a good day, I sing along with Torch (to drown out the guitar). The thing screams with static. Four songs, pop and Bollywood. They also come from the time En and I were separating, so they’ll always allude to discord. (Saying that, I bought a vanilla perfume at the same time, and every day I love the scent of it, misting a little on my collar.)
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SISTER FUR SEAL, BROTHER SWAN
I go for a walk with my Dad. We cross fields near a beach.
‘It’s mixed,’ I say of the state of housing here.
‘This side of the street, all the houses are below the road,’ says Dad, saying something which isn’t an opinion. ‘Boxwood, ngaios up there.’ He points to the bank across the street. ‘Hoary old macrocarpas.’
I look up. An opinion.
But he gets excited about fur seal pips entering the lagoon, as I mean him to. While none is there today, sand pipers and seagulls are. ‘Sun Dial is into bird watching,’ he says of a friend.
He’s also pleased by the nook behind the Domain Hall; bulrushes, the lagoon lapping at our feet, a long table under an autumn bough.
‘There are those swans you were talking about.’ He points beyond the rushes. ‘Heaps of them.’
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SQUALLS
Yesterday I was surprised I felt so good, on my evening walk, about the moss on a stone garden below a house; about an oak by an abandoned brick house; about living in a cold climate. This city is my high-school sweetheart. I moved here half a life ago when I turned 18 and when I’m well I love it. I look smart in my chestnut boots and black jeans, my bomber jacket and that black fisherman’s beanie they wear here, the men with stubble and their pant hems up. Builder-artist-port workers. I’m not that, but you do need a beanie in Dunedin, and my midlength hair out the bottom of it, like beagle ears, looks well. When I’m male again, I’ll wear one earring. You know? You know.
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BIRD WATCHERS TAKE THEIR TIME
ANTARTIC TERN Sterna Vittata
Description: 16”. Rather smaller than a White-Fronted Tern. Forehead, crown, nape black; a broad streak of white from gape below eye to nape; outerwebs of outermost primaries blackish; rump and tail white, only the outerwebs of the tail feathers being grey; underparts, including throat, greyish white; but under tail-coverts white. Bill vermillion or coral red, legs orange. Tail deeply forked, white.
Would any person with the will to describe birds describe them so well? Ornithologists have to find them repeatedly and wait.
R.A. Falla, R.B. Sibbon, E.G. Turbott 1966 first published.
a n a t o m y
nape I love
gape and primaries as nouns I can guess, and love
only the outerwebs of the tail feathers being grey is contractual, dated language and I love it. A less formal account, a contemporary account might say the outerwebs are grey but being grey feels lengthy, poised, a clause
underparts I love
I love the prose. A written description of a bird is old fashioned. Writing is a limited medium. Colour plates (included) show the proportions of facial features. (Speaking of which, my mum’s twin sister was able to unlock her facial recognition phone, and they’ve told me this numerous times, delighted.) Of course I love descriptions of a face and body’s aspect: I was a portrait artist once. I have to know where your nose is in relation to your eye.
Angela Trolove 