Clouds are so amazing.

"Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

[...]

The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help. We are alone in this quest, and Fortunata is right not to disguise it, though she may be wrong about love. I have met a great many pilgrims on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves. Perhaps I'm missing the point -- perhaps whilst looking for someone else you might come across yourself unexpectedly, in a garden somewhere or on a mountain watching the rain. But they don't seem to care about who they are. Some of them have told me that the very point of searching for God is to forget about oneself, to lose oneself for ever. But it is not difficult to lose oneself, or is it the ego that they are talking about, the hollow, screaming cadaver that has no spirit within it?

I think that cadaver is only the ideal self run mad, and if the other life, the secret life, could be found and brought home, then a person might live in peace and have no need for God. After all, He has no need for us, being complete."

--Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry.

"When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden it was not for me.

He was courteous and polite; he enjoyed being at home, but in the fantasy of his home I was not the one who sat opposite him and laughed at his jokes. He didn't want to change anything; he liked his life. The only thing he wanted to change was me.

It would have been better if he had hated me, or if he had abused me, or if he had packed his new suitcases and left.

As it was he continued to put his arm round me and talk about building a new wall to replace the forgotten fence that divided our garden from his vegetable patch. I knew he would never leave our house. He had worked for it.

Day by day I felt myself disappearing. For my husband I was no longer a reality, I was one of those things around him. I was the fence which needed to be replaced. I watched myself in the mirror and saw that I was no longer vivid and exciting. I was worn and grey like an old sweater you can't throw out but won't put on.

He admitted he was in love with her, but he said he loved me.

Translated, that means, I want everything. Translated, that means, I don't want to hurt you yet. Translated, that means, I don't know what to do, give me time.

Why, why should I give you time? What time are you giving me? I am in a cell waiting to be called for execution.

I loved him and I was in love with him. I didn't use language to make a war-zone of my heart.

'You're so simple and good,' he said, brushing the hair from my face.

He meant, Your emotions are not complex like mine. My dilemma is poetic.

But there was no dilemma. He no longer wanted me, but he wanted our life.

Eventually, when he had been away with her for a few days and returned restless and conciliatory, I decided not to wait in my cell any longer. I went to where he was sleeping in another room and I asked him to leave. Very patiently he asked me to remember that the house was his home, that he couldn't be expected to make himself homeless because he was in love.

'Medea did,' I said, 'and Romeo and Juliet, and Cressida, and Ruth in the Bible.'

He asked me to shut up. He wasn't a hero.

'Then why should I be a heroine?'

He didn't answer, he plucked at the blanket.

I considered my choices.
I could stay and be unhappy and humiliated.
I could leave and be unhappy and dignified.
I could beg him to touch me again.
I could live in hope and die of bitterness.

I took some things and left. It wasn't easy, it was my home too.

I hear he's replaced the back fence."

--Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry.

Rethinking Regret

Let's thank our mistakes, let's bless them
for their humanity, their terribly weak chins.
We should offer them our gratitude and admiration
for giving us our clefts and scarring us with
embarrassment, the hot flash of confession.
Thank you, transgressions! for making us so right
in our imperfections. Less flawed, we might have
turned away, feeling too fit, our desires looking
for better directions. Without them, we might have
passed the place where one of us stood, watching
someone else walk away, and followed them,
while our perfect mistake walked straight towards us,
walked right into our cluttered, ordered lives
that could have been closed but were not,
that could have been asleep, but instead
stayed up, all night, forgetting the pill,
the good book, the necessary eight hours,
and lay there -- in the middle of the bed --
keeping the heart awake-open and stunned,
stunning. How unhappy perfection must be
over there on the shelf without a crack, without
this critical break -- this falling -- this sudden, thrilling draft.

--Elaine Sexton

"How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?"

--Don DeLillo, White Noise, p. 198.

Beautiful Dreamer

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,
Lull'd by the moonlight have all pass'd away!

Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song,
List while I woo thee with soft melody;
Gone are the cares of life's busy throng, --
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea
Mermaids are chaunting the wild lorelie;
Over the streamlet vapors are borne,
Waiting to fade at the bright coming morn.

Beautiful dreamer, beam on my heart,
E'en as the morn on the streamlet and sea;
Then will all clouds of sorrow depart, --
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

--Stephen Foster

When you are weary with age,
and the hearth is cooling with the dying embers of the evening fire,
remember, my darling: you were loved.
Oh, how you were loved.

When the kettle whistles for an era gone
as you shuffle a waltz to the stove. When
the wind clutches at your bones with an ice impenetrable.
Pause. Consider.

You were loved, through and through. And I was too. I was too.

12th May, 2.30am
Moon-talk. I wake to a ferment of ideas. Is this what Laura means when she talks about the excesses of her premenstrual state? She tells me that women can have heightened states of awareness and wild proliferations of ideas, hormonally, just before menstruation. In my premenstrual migraine I usually feel clumsy and inept and want to shut the world out. But tonight it is full moon, I am bleeding, my belly aches with menstrual cramps and I feel like squatting and baying at the moon. I surrender to the flow of ideas--patterns rather than words. It is a wild connectedness where images merge and fire off each other and my mind explodes. What is this other kind of thinking that happens in the night?

--From Margaret Somerville's Body/Landscape Journals

...Some things

you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

--From Philip Levine, 'The Simple Truth'

Shall I compare thee to a winter’s night?
By river’s edge, with inky rolling waves.
Although the ocean’s wind has fearful bite,
In quite no other dark do stars behave.
The autumn flowers wilt at violent rate
And trees in spindly stature bring no shade,
But the most valued of the bulbs do wait,
For winter is when Nature’s start is made.
There is a depth in loss, beauty concealed
That none may understand but those who seek
Such comforts in renewal: a truth revealed
To those in quiet thought who do not speak.
So long as seasons turn to snow and storm,
So long these words aflame may keep you warm.

If I love
I will love beyond today--
beyond the sensuous tingling of the body--
beyond the imprisoned slavery of the mind--
I will love freely
as love was meant to be--
like the white wings of a gull
on a journey to the sun--
like the wonder of tomorrow
and the wonder of a thousand tomorrows
with the faith of a thousand yesterdays
which have freed me
to love this way--

--Nan Witcomb

The One Certainty.

Vanity of vanities, the Preacher saith,

All things are vanity. The eye and ear

Cannot be filled with what they see and hear.

Like early dew, or like the sudden breath

Of wind, or like the grass that withereth,

Is man, tossed to and fro by hope and fear:

So little joy hath he, so little cheer,

Till all things end in the long dust of death.

To-day is still the same as yesterday,

To-morrow also even as one of them;

And there is nothing new under the sun:

Until the ancient race of Time be run,

The old thorns shall grow out of the old stem,

And morning shall be cold and twilight grey.

--Christina Rossetti

let me count the ways.
I want neither Lethe, nor wolf-bane,
and there are no buds in May.
honesty is lonely if dullness is homely, and
wine is sweeter under the winter sky's carpet of stars.
people will come and speak with us,
strangers, sometimes, meek and mild,
and we will dream of the river dragging silt through time.

and yet.
there is something in it.
beyond the page, something in the cells of our skin,
the narratives of the human,
the poet, the lover, the friend.
the parts we play to keep death entertained and
too busy to lead us astray into the.
what else.
what else is there to do but try.
try with all the might of those who will die.

we danced with the heat of a thousand suns rising

It's as simple and as difficult as giving it everything.

Wake, the parting of water, this design of ripples they are making. This pattern on pattern made in the shock waves of uncompleted mourning.

--Gail Jones, Five Bells

What are words but little islands of lies? Little islands of pretenses and pretends. The coward's retreat, the scholar's beloved contract with passivity. They serve only as the run-up to activity, a preparation or declaration or mitigation of something that remains imaginary until it leads to action. Words, and words alone. More words, and more still. And for what?

Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

--John Keats

and softly, and slowly, and completely, and naturally, and forcefully, and spectacularly, and otherworldly, and authentically, and generously, and understandingly, and realistically, and thoroughly, and riskily, and daily, and healthily, and extraordinarily, and altruistically, and inclusively, and unashamedly, and somewhere as close to as long as we can.

2007 #2.

It bothers me that I know your number by heart, and yet I haven't called and neither have you, and I haven't written and neither have you, and I plan ways to leave your books at your front door without a message, in a plastic bag so they don't feel too lost, beside the door because in front would seem like a happy delivery.

And I wonder whether you are leaving me like I left him, quietly and brutally, to prepare yourself for the distances, the silences and the love affairs. How else does one operate on the heart, but with instruments that slice.

It bothers me that I would know where to find you tonight
With foam upon your cupid's bow in the dim and dusty light.
Filling the lack in your gut, filling up the lack,
Since you don't know I'm back in town, you don't know I'm back.

2007.

From across the world I told you I loved you in my own way, in three times the words and half of the time. I placed you in the no regrets bag lined in silk of the reddest red. You replied in half the words and twice the feeling, landing me in a black velvet jewellery box of mirrors and cushions to help me stay beautiful despite my dirty jeans and rumpled hair. We touched like in the movies we so adored in the dark, I flew across the continents and oceans to knock at your front door and you let me in with the slow smile you reserve for those about whom you thought the night before.

2008.

The dress Tia Toni knitted was pink and grey like the galahs outside near the parking lot. I was standing holding the bar above my head, two metres high, looking at the planes and not understanding. The photo shows the dress hugging my strong little body as I look out, uncertain about everything.

I used to think I could hear heartbeats in trees. Jodie and I would climb up to the tallest branches and look across to the hills, and I'd put my ear to the smooth bark and not hear a beat but wish I did. I knew they were alive somehow, and that they were important and felt pain. Years later when I heard about the kooky experiment that found plants screamed real high so people can't hear it when plants next to them were hurt, I smiled and thought to myself, I knew it.

Me and Pauline used to play netball after school. I ran fast to get the ball but we weren't allowed to play in school shoes not runners because the ground was bitumen and the shoes had no grip. I was wearing school shoes and shouldn't have been playing, and when I slipped and skidded on the little tiny rocks, and I was still pulling my stockings out of my leg an hour later, I wanted to know whether you could see bits of me left on the ground but I had nobody to ask. I think I went maybe fifty metres far, it was really far. Pauline had to sit out because her knee was sore. She went to the doctors and found out she had cancer, then she stopped coming to school. I looked inside her desk and there were still books. When she came back she walked funny like her leg was a stick or she was a robot. They took her hair and then they took a bone out, you know the sticking out flat one at the front that makes your knee bend, so she really did have a stick inside her leg to keep it straight. She couldn't run around anymore so we talked instead. Nobody talked as well as Pauline did.

When I threw the rake at him, I didn't think I'd hit him. I was angry because he said something mean and I was far away and I couldn't throw perfectly that well but I hit him perfectly. It scraped the skin on his back and he yelled loud till mum came out. I told her it was the pool water that made it hurt but she hurt my arm when she pulled me out. Mum shouted kind of quiet that I could have killed him and sent me to my room. I cried till it hurt because I thought God would make me die. He wasn't allowed to come to my house again.

2006.

She leaned forward a little and the neckline of her black top moved slightly down and to the right, revealing a soft wart or a dermal bubble of some kind. For a moment I thought it was a quirky misplaced nipple, romanticizing what was only an accidental biological bump.

An instant of unveiling. A secret of the flesh. A personal shame. She'd written about lovers examining each other's skin in the morning haze and I couldn't help thinking of exotic lips kissing the delicate raised mushroom at different times in different places, crooning in strange languages. Such unsurpassed mental clarity, chinadoll face and luminous unveiled eyes, and yet, so ordinarily flawed in body.

She would have liked this accidental show of miscreation, mortalised forever. The vulnerability of skin, the clothed disrepair of corporeal substance. Had it been in a movie, it would have been her favourite scene.

A life in the face of an eventual death.

It's a playground of sorts. Swinging back and forth, push, pull, closer and further away. A see-saw of highs and lows, the heights reached and the inevitable fall to the ground. The monkey bars gripped so tightly, hanging white-knuckled and shallow-breathed, struggling to continue to the next bar to grab. A balancing act atop the rope bridge, carefully moving over something crossable. And through it all, the white crunchy sand that fills each pocket, each sock, each fold of skin, so that always our delicate marshmallow bodies follow us around without our forgetting them.

"How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interiors by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse."

Jeanette Winterson -- The Passion

Summer child lazily lizarding the days away.

no promises of silks,
i do not expect pure joy in each moment,
nor tenderness in every word.
give me only truth.
give me yourself and none other, the
mullings that keep you awake, the
visions of future comforts,
the shirt you wear when your skin doesn't fit.

i have nothing to impart but simplicity and the real.
no throne, no glory, no fame to my name.
my memory deceives me and i stammer often
but i am strong as the moon in all its crescents,
those smiles up and around the sky.
i breathe ocean air deep,
watch the tide further creep,
and will hold you together so you do not disappear.

My earrings are mocking me.