Development

 

The house of solid dreams has met the developer, its unmaker. I stare at the square of muddy hillside already staked out with posts and striped with tyre tracks. This had been one house of dreams we might have bought, had we not bought our own house of solid dreams down the street and around the corner. That was in the days when we explored along the Heidelberg ridge for a home, peering in real estate windows, circling the Saturday auctions with iridescent blue biro. This region of the metropolis has the longest long-term residents, on average 23 years, staying and thriving. I ponder the construction site fencing, dwell upon all the houses in all the length of the Heidelberg ridge that we may have bought instead of the one we bought and what lives we may have lived there, rather than here around the corner. Of the fact that of all the cities in the world we could have lived, their historical sweep and rainy patches, we lived in this immense Australian city, which is relatively recent as cities go, never mind Damascus; though this immenseness is already of some vintage and considerable size compared with more modern cities, demonstrably demonstrative dubious Dubai. The mind wonders, as it notices blue sky, how of all the planets in solar systems like our own, we find ourselves on Earth, as we call it, and not some other turbocharged planet in a rainbow galaxy someplace else. Earth is very much to the fore and in the line of vision, now that the house of solid dreams has been removed to a waste disposal on the outskirts of the metropolis, and the grandiose shade tree gone to a green waste place that spread branches in all directions across half of the garden, or site as we would say at this juncture. Erasure is a popular word with academics and a popular pastime with developers as they leave only vaguest outlines of solid dreams in a tabula rasa of mud. We had to agree that the house that was here was too small for our needs. We were puzzled that the builders took no advantage of the view across the valley to Gresswell and Springthorpe. This put us in the way of imagining the purchase of a modest dacha, or palace even of solid dreams and foolproof plumbing, pretensions to which are on show already along the Heidelberg ridge, but our imaginations dwelt most readily in somewhere liveable. Gazing through the construction fence it is not hard to imagine the house of solid dreams, and price tag, that developers will build on this slope of rainy slush: a house like all the others being built across the Antipodean metropolis, charcoal and beige, with an upstairs affording views of the valley, plumbing to speak of, no shade trees and probably no garden. It will be a place of solid dreams and a big mortgage, the amount of land required to live, apparently, and to avoid homelessness here on planet Earth.  

Roundabout

 

Crescents, you would think, are designed and built to slow down traffic. Indeed, to slow down life in general, life being a matter of not knowing precisely what is around the next corner. Time bends and space bends light. At times though it is hard to know what to think. A vehicle picking up speed around a crescent risks unforeseen mishaps, a pedestrian stepping out, a magpie on the white line, or another vehicle carelessly overtaking in a blind spot. Crescents don’t have to equate with sedate, they can be industrious and pleasant, but you expect drivers to go slow with the bend. This view has been tested once more with the latest flattening of the roundabout sign. You wonder if the red inverted triangle universally imprinted in the mind as Give Way, has ever entered the consciousness of these pole vaulters. Their grasp of the concept Roundabout is at a very early stage of development. Together with the steel guard rail on the other side of this particular roundabout, which is driven into several times per year by truck drivers with scant regard for circles, we have here our own local (albeit minor) version of the Montague Street Bridge. Drivers have a mind of their own, some of them, that is a mind not attentive to anyone else, or any thing else. Drivers, some of them, will cross three lanes of a freeway without using the blinker. Drivers, one or two, accelerate as amber has turned to red. You would think drivers would understand that crescents and roundabouts are self-explanatory road devices designed to assist the driver to avoid mishaps. But then, you would think that. It has to be conceded, this roundabout is narrow. The landscaped omphalos and impressive eucalypt that dignify the centre of the intersection are a teensy bit too big. The camber at the edge of the roundabout is perhaps too high for some vehicles. Buses may charge across the roundabout with a heffalump bump, while your Mercedes Benz must negotiate the bends mercurially, and your bull-bar brute treats the roundabout as an obstacle impeding its progress, to be conquered by force rather than treated with respect. To which arises the question of what kind of vehicle cuts corners and takes down a road sign in one fell acceleration? A fairly heavy duty one. One that plans to get from A to B in a straight line that hasn’t time for crescents and roundabouts. There must a few of these vehicles on the job because they keep the nature strips at these round corners grass-free, a compound of beaten earth that develops long puddles at the first sign of rain. Eventually the men from Banyule or the Roads come to straighten the sign, or mend the guard, or fix the overhead wires, or trim the impressive eucalypt. Eventually is on average about five days.

Critic

 

Real theatre took a back seat midweek with a special viewing of The Critic, the self-absorbed melodramaturge of opinions read by directors and actors alike, very occasionally prospective audience. His legend goes before him in the form of bland generalisations, bewildering prejudices, and unnecessary slights, such is the armoury of this fearless skewer with his motto of take no prisoners. The arrival could not have been more anti-climactic. Those expecting the prancing pronouncement, the swaggering sweep, were met instead with a bustling busybody in misshapen suit, a mezzo-pretzel with half an idea, half a laugh, his fly at half-mast. Such is the surprise element required in all good theatre and The Critic did not let us down. Sidling to the bar he ordered a lemon breezer to get in touch with his inner demon and focus his remaining brain cells. Never were eyeballs enflamed with more lordly fervour or malign intent as he slumped into his crimson plush Seat 13 Row Q, the throne of the god. Slump was convincing but glare left much to be desired; glaze, perhaps? Fidgeting with the program notes he reminded himself of the plot, citizens of that whole nation of pretenders who are people like us. His shoelace wished to exit stage left. The internal soliloquy that accompanies his every review show was switched on, turning the sweetest performance into words that leave a taste in the mouth. Some have wondered how he found his way into theatre in the first place, having so few good words for it, and even more wish he would find his way out again via the fire exit. Act 2 was not his best moment, The Critic bent slovenly, with head resting on his fist through stagecraft to make angels weep, but inspired in him bristling snorts and unselfconscious grinding of back molars, responses turned into acrimonious English by the time he was in the taxi home. Why he ended up on this side of the curtain is a missing chapter of his biography, the lacuna a playwright could dramatize and probably has, so much of theatre being the things not said at the time. Interval was an interminable if revealing performance of small talk for The Critic, catching up with retired Shakespeareans, avoiding the latest Chekhov, and that Molière on speed, before his understated return to form in the half-slump pretzel position. His mind made up before the denouement, he longed for the days when giants walked the boards and he could hold a part, alas a time that is neither youth nor age. Given the ratio of time spent in this posture, he should have reviewed the carpet. The night was young as theatregoers flooded out into the bright lights, their heads filled with inklings and imaginings from actions seen and heard, while for The Critic it was a shambling direction uberwards while his mind homed in on the worst aspects of the spectacle and started sharpening adjectives. His audience awaited.    

       

Photograph: the costume Bridie made for Peter Quince, the playwright within the play ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, her school play in 2019. Sometimes with reviews we wish someone would review the reviewer, an idea I have taken literally in this case. A childhood memory is of my father grumbling on Monday or Tuesday mornings at The Age review of the weekend’s concert by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, a concert he attended invariably. The Age reviewer was Felix Werder, a composer and musician who made it his business to write consistently negative reviews of the MSO, whatever the program and whatever the standard of the performance. Werder’s reviews were so predictably lacking in any positive remarks that they became a joke, but my father took it all too seriously. Werder was a kind of bête noire at our breakfasts.  

Entry

 

Do whatever your hand finds to do and don’t take thought for the morrow. Open the curtains on a grey dawn. Dribble dries for the cat into a bowl and place near his nose. Turn on the heater to warm rooms for breakfast. Listen to magpies outside in the street. Find a little paper cup in which to count out daily medication list of pills, exact milligrams of thinners and straighteners and reducers. Stack up last night’s dishes ready to wash sometime this morning, those grimy plates. Toast the toast, percolate the coffee. Read the emails but more importantly delete hundreds in bulk deletes, it has to be done, just do it. Write a comforting email in response to the bad health news in a friend’s incoming message. Write an email explaining the tight workplace arrangements to a potential volunteer. Smile at the fact the major news politicians promised this morning from the capital will be available in the fullness of time. Tidy remains of a manuscript draft into one stack, ready to resume in maybe a month’s time, if that is the fullness of time. Read Etty Hillesum’s wartime diaries with delight and consolation. Find Etty quotes on empathy and love to use in a zoom paper. Walk down to the pharmacy at the Village to buy the next repeat of an unpronounceable medication. Talk to the pharmacist about his hay fever, about which he can do nothing when it gets really full-on. Buy bread from the little supermarket and chat with the woman at the register. Breathe in fresh air made fresher by strong winds. Test lung capacity as a hillside path approaches and learn your limits, young man. Do whatever your hand finds to do and don’t take thought for the morrow. Admire how wattle in bloom hangs like a bright yellow cloud over a paling fence along a blowy street, even better even than Clarice Beckett even. Pick up a couple of empty throwaway coffee cups dancing circles on a concrete path. Place cups in a public waste bin. Make vocabulary notes about shapes of native flowers up on Hilltop Avenue. Do whatever your hand finds to do and don’t take thought for the morrow. Prepare ham toasties for lunch with a half dozen or so pitted olives. Read online comments  and make helpful comments about same-sex marriage and secret portfolios. Retire for the mandatory afternoon siesta recommended by physios. Wake later and do the washing up, all of it now. Sit outside in the sun, feel good. Pinch out broad bean heads. Do whatever your hand finds to do and don’t take thought for the morrow. Read more Etty. Write inspired account of the day so far based on entry in Etty Hillesum’s Diaries for Monday morning the 20^th of October 1941 in occupied Amsterdam, itself inspired by the line at Ecclesiastes 9:10. Admit it’s not as compact as Etty’s entry. For there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom where you are going after death.

Sermon

 

Worship was the primary example that John Bayton (1930-2022) set to all of those around him. He led from the front, not least when he was seen singing the hymn at the tail of the procession, all the words. His conduct of services live in the memory, as do the words of many of his sermons. A pun that he used more than once in sermons was ‘to re-member’, which he extended like John Donne or someone into an entire way of understanding what was happening at the Eucharist. To re-member is to be brought together again into a union of fellowship, to take that which is broken and heal it, to receive and see for the first time that which is done every time in this act of relationship with the host. Sometimes, being a Jungian, he related his dreams to the congregation. This could be disconcerting to some in attendance but he was not indulging in personal psychodrama and the content seemed to be connected to the readings for the Sunday. He wished us to explore our own dreams, to intuit for ourselves what they said. His dreams were related in accord with the action of revelation. A sentence I remember very well from one sermon was that “we are not called to be good, we are called to be holy.” He meant whole and holy in mind, body, and spirit. One Christmas Eve he raised the question of child sexual abuse and what we think we are doing with the Nativity of the person whom the story later relates as the broken victim, Jesus. This was not what the festive congregation had come to hear but neither was anyone leaving with a complaint that his wake-up call was inappropriate. At another Christmas he took us through the secret catechism known as the Twelve Days, with its ultimate chorus of Christ himself, the partridge in the pear tree. Such sermons exemplified in words his love of image and imagination. The imago Dei was his daily concern. John Bayton was an artist. On weekdays that were fair weather he was observed after breakfast painting his latest canvas in the vicarage garden. Some of these would find their way, liturgically, into his sermons. I seem to remember him placing one large painting on an easel opposite the pulpit, a painting that was a Last Supper with apostles missing and not enough food to go round. This was offered as an image of the contemporary church. A painting I remember very well was of the Magi, standing together each clothed in the colour of their gift. It was sombre like a Rothko. This painting was prompted, or so it seemed from the words in his sermon, by the famous reading of the story in the sermon of Saint Ambrose of Milan. Gold is for the king of glory, myrrh foreshadows his burial, and (creatively) frankincense is burning up, the smoke rising into space like prayer. This was all back when women’s ordination was threatening schism, or worse, but he would preach on occasions in Ordinary Time that this was no reason to tear the church apart. His listeners in the pews held every kind of position on the subject and listened thoughtfully. To reflect on such sermons now is to arrive at the understanding, this too will pass.

Photograph: Bishop John Bayton worked at different times in his life at St George’s College and at the Cathedral in Jerusalem. One long series of paintings he made were what could be called Jerusalem mandalas. They are icons, you’d have to say, and we have some at home, see the picture. Colleagues in Brisbane have advised that + John’s funeral will be held at St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane on Tuesday the 30^th of August at 2 pm.

Job

 The expression jobs for the boys has transformed into jobs for the boy. In the Land of the Long Weekend people are scratching their heads about anyone with one job secretly taking on five more jobs with the same work hours and no increase in pay. Not only taking on the jobs, but wanting to. How many more jobs was he doing, they ask expectantly. A general rule universally truthful is that every extra job you take on means less and less time spent on the main job you’re there to do. Multiply that by five and your main job may be reduced to looking like you’re doing something, which might be all you are in fact doing. The term micromanage is normally used in a pejorative sense of someone who does not trust other people’s performances, so must spend time watching over every action of others in their jobs, interfering with the processes, and generally creating tension and confusion. This is one cause for the saying too many chiefs and not enough Indians. However, the term has yet to be invented for someone who secretly signs himself up for other people’s jobs and then does nothing much. Or at least, does something but no one knows what, least of all the actual holders of those jobs. Yet what does he know from being in those jobs that he would not have otherwise known, the inhabitants wonder, rolling their eyes. Inhabitants of the Land of the Long Weekend are also finding it odd how anyone would not think to tell someone they know about these extra jobs, not least the people who are supposed to hold those jobs. The literature at this point introduces words like secrecy and dysfunctionality and messianism as a way of indicating that what is going on is very odd. Novels could be written (titles like ‘Unhelpful Teals’ and ‘Unprecedented Bushfires’) describing this kind of behaviour though they might be read as fanciful or perhaps satires of a society that assumes everyone behaves the same way that they do. Psychological treatises analysing this case might use language that is libellous, which is why they are circulated in attachments between professional friends, or deposited in a 100-year time capsule with a rugby scarf and an Hawaiian shirt. Defamation is however acceptable in cartoon form or comments threads. Some weekenders ask how the head of the organisation didn’t know about someone doing other people’s jobs without their knowledge, to which the answer is he did know, at least that there was some sort of duplication of resources going on, only it’s very hard to say no to an employee whose CV includes the position of prime minister somewhere near the top. Descendants may prise open the capsule to find that this was indeed a once in 100-year event, that the scarf must go into a museum immediately, and that the psychological report for this employee contains antiquated terms, quaint was one reaction, that need translating into present day jargon (‘trigintism’, ‘scomania’) to be comprehensible, or believable.

Sempé

 

Every day there are obituaries for forgotten film actors and minor rock stars and we try to remember what we remember of them and pass on to climate updates. Today I read of the death of Sempé in the newspaper, which gives me pause, as images of good humour and cheerfulness and an indescribable nostalgia fill my mind that perhaps I should try to describe before the effervescent moment passes, before the opportunity is lost in daily routine. Sempé, it says, produced (past tense) more covers for The New Yorker than any other artist, a claim that I thought would have belonged to Saul Steinberg, that master of the ink nib still life and the infinite detail. When my in-laws, who subscribe, hand on the next supermarket bag of this magazine my eye always catches the latest Sempé cartoon, its florid watercolours and dreamy graphics like something out of Marc Chagall just this side of when Chagall goes incautiously sentimental. I eventually tear off the cover, after reading articles about forgotten American authors and minor travellers to antique moons, and place it with the others inside the flap of one of my books of Sempé art. These are books that I purchased in big remainder shops, in the days when Melbourne had such shops, a dozen copies of full-colour Sempé books stacked up on tables amidst all the other dozens of stacks of dozens of individual art titles. During forgotten rainy weekends and minor hours on summer mornings, I pass the time browsing through art books like Sempé’s, admiring how with a pen he can create an entire treescape, possibly a Parisian park, using little unconnected bendy lines like Edward Ardizzone, with visitors caught in a humourous moment that only I the reader am privy to. Impressionism is one of Jean-Jacques Sempé’s debts and Paris is his environment, the Paris of Ludwig Bemelmans, another artist-storyteller of whimsical realism, sitting at a garret window, outlining roofscapes and rooftop gardeners with crosshatched watering cans. The obituaries say he wanted to be a jazz musician, which explains why jazz and musicians are such favourite subjects in his drawings, Sempé playing out the dream via his own discovered best medium. Phrases in the obituaries possess all the glancing accuracy of Sempé: ‘irony and tenderness’ says Orhan Pamuk, ‘a lot of silent emotion’ says fellow artist Plantu. We read about how he overcame a violent childhood to illustrate the world and its inhabitants with exuberance and wit, a joy in the present moment that animates his portraits of Gerard Hoffnung musicians at their instruments or Ronald Searle gabblers at cafés, of a dreamer on a bicycle bicycling benignly through sketchy Michael Leunig-like seasons along a forgotten street in a minor arrondissement.

Apple

 

Sugar in quantities is not good for me, so lately under the new regime of ‘changed, changed utterly’ I eat apples after meals. My daughter and I joke about it. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. I’m eating three apples a day. You are keeping three doctors away. That’s been the norm, given recent life in hospital, three doctors. Well, look now, no doctors. Large bags of juicy red apples are purchased regularly, making for a toppled mountain on the Iznik plate. If I’m not careful one will roll across the table edge and onto the floor. Carefully I bend to pick it up so as not to stretch the nerves around my ribcage. In early September I have promised to give a paper that includes material about Simone Weil, so now after meals I re-read lots of her essays, epigrams, and letters. Formidable, whether pronounced the English or French way, does not finally explain Simone Weil. On a given day in her Holland Park room in London in 1943 she can be analysing and questioning the terms of a new French Constitution for Charles de Gaulle and the Resistance active in that city, writing the posthumous book that became ‘L’Enracinement’ and (‘and’ in italics – ed.) composing elegant ten-page letters about the foundations of geometry to her mathematician brother André Weil, living safely in New York. There is no one else like Simone Weil and this is a consolation as I reflect on even the simplest of her spiritual sayings. A sentence in one letter to her parents, also in New York, goes: “The pure taste of the apple is as much a contact with the beauty of the universe as the contemplation of a picture by Cézanne.” In the context of rations and bombardments these words take on more meaning than they would anyway. I think of those people at this very moment now today in the world for whom an apple would be sufficient for the moment, with food scarce and the future not much future. I think of the person for whom the taste of the apple is enough reassurance to explain the universe, to put one entirely in touch with the universe, the universe in which we find ourselves; as complete with meaning as her valued Greek geometry and the geometric games of the French visual revolutionary Paul Cézanne. I think about the difficult fact that she is at time of writing starving herself because she refuses to eat more than her compatriots in occupied France, so that one apple might be all she is eating per day, we don’t know. This fact is where, like other extreme areas of her witness, I stop, asking would she not have been more help alive than dead at 34 from malnutrition and tuberculosis? But then, almost everything about Simone Weil is formidable and a confrontation to my settled perspectives. Or anyone’s perspective.    

Obsidian

 

Obsidian Norman Harvey comes in through the bathroom window, projected by a silver zoom. A wooden ladder rests against the outside wall, there to assist his scaling and abseiling from said yonder window. His firm smooth figure tiptoes on sill, leaps to floor tile, gravitates to door awhile, black as his name. Really it’s a case of checking for food and marking boundaries, round the clock, however on days of extreme it means sniffing out the warmest or coolest locale in the rooms available, all depending on the season. Our excitement at seeing this noirish feline, our finer feelings about the long-tailed history of his species, are minor matters to him as he pads towards warm or, depending, it’s all in the feel, cool. If he requires attention he will let us know, with a body caress across the ankles, circling presence then cross-weave, or sudden buffet of the knuckles with his forehead. This last gesture means he wants us to tickle his skull, smooth his coat, and speak sweet nothings until he is a purring ball of sop snuggled nearby. Miaous are not his thing, leading to the impression that our cat is the tall dark and handsome quiet type. His metabolism and feistiness make up for this absence, traces of Oriental maybe Burmese we think, as he pushes his weight against us mere humans or pounces with a right claw that we like to pretend is all playfulness. Eventually he curls into one of his best pitch-black mandalas that remind us of why he is the centre of the universe, at least for a few hours each day. What does he dream about? Is he, like us, sorting out the seven sins of his life in a Dada theatre? Or is he a clean slate, black as night, indifferent to chalking up the pluses and minuses of psyche? The centre of the universe isn’t saying, calm as, unobserved by any known telescope. Technically Obsidian is not our cat, he is Bridie’s cat. This is not only true according to the unwritten law of the household, but also in terms of the overwhelming main source of attention, affection, and alimentary additives. Thanks to this triple-A rating he awakes alive again to exit via the silver lever and sliding scale of bliss into the garden, clawed. There he stalks through broad beans, inspects the insects, ducks a mynah, scrambles over a fence in search of unknowns that commensurably are generally the same unknowns he explores every other day of the month. That quiver by the compost bin rivets his frame, but was it a mouse or a falling leaf? Soon he will excavate something exquisite from the outside storage room, to be dragged like a length of sky along the path and into the house, there to be presented officially and lengthily at our feet, with a tiny Oriental phoneme of pride and mission accomplished: a silken bathrobe of sapphire and almost obsidian (you could say) design, otherwise destined for the op shop.

 

 

In celebration of International Cat Day (August the 8^th), here are some words about Obsidian. The photograph is one of our favourites of Obsie, sitting in a garden container, the king of all he surveys.

 

 

Insular

 

Insiders propose that their island holds them and cannot lose them. It is the seeming simplicity of here and now. Their hand around the bottle, the hand good at mending fences, good at dealing cards and names, hand pointing inward at the known signs, this hand has strength for a circumscribed round. Known signs take on the value and meaning of the heart, the limbs, the genitals, all the organs and senses. The certain sorts of hill, the set style of buildings, the sensible contoured layout of autochthonous museum roads, have constituted their own law, unsayable except in whisper breaths and the local laconicisms. Law is written in these voices and leaves and stones. No amount of shipping or telecasting can alter the law that is not written. It exists in the hand, the townscape, the unique toponyms, the temperature at this sunny time of the day, the climate on skin, the curve of bird flight. It is the island each one carries inside who lives on the island. It says, give us the elasticity of new tasks and regular tasks, give us a distraction to supplement the distraction of drink and poker, even a place that is beyond the shoreline that we may look at the shape of our own place like an earthrise. The hell of the typical rock and the typical hill and typical bright-eyed bird is better than the hell of rock changed beyond recognition and of hill razed to serve an alien port. There is an urge to rediscover, an urge to uncover the old and new. The body stays still, the body meets a body, the body moves to the climatic times, dances casually at walking pace in the space allowed, within a set circle roughened by sea and erosion, a circle in the shape of an island which is a shape surely contained in our craniums. Outsiders maintain the islands cannot hold them, not the deeper half. The world is large enough to accommodate all manner of life and speculation, small enough to leave aside what is peripheral and of small moments. We could spend a great time in the shadows of trees settling our sight towards the rising blue. Islands bear our intrusion. They have us, and though the welcomes are genuine on both sides, we must both make do. The cones, the shells, the fish spines, everything here is a beautiful object and beautiful, the imperilling waves, the abandoned bus. Walking around here is like growing used to the shape of our body for the first time and the shape of our lover’s body. Out there is horizon. From it come terrific noises we do not even hear in our dreams. We love the noises and laconicisms here, at least the ones we think we understand, but we are wanton and selfish, factoring in time. Nothing can equal those noises, the desires they set up inside, that continue ever after we have returned home. Soon all the fond connections will stay out of reach, for days after weeks later, asking what to make of the island now and how was beauty like that, before going away finally.

Fluvial

 

Rivers are the well-made, self-created music. Demarcated by the deep incisions of water the land is stated by its gullies and valleys, is guestimated against the availability and level of water in motion. Land thinks back at every river turn to its fortunate maintenance. Creatures think back even when going to the tap. These prolonged evolutions over continental enormity course to the living bud, speak in the cortex, before there was ancient, I am. Smoothed stones throw up history at every turn, they are the instruments upon which water now runs off in swift and churning sounds. The banks, from alpine beaches of egg smooth, down to platypus stillness, down to rooty rushing overhangs, down to idle grassy walk-on parts, even down to gorge depths, or up along artificial canals and through cranking mills, control the unmistakeable continuance which is history of self-construction and survival, the music of the calmest and uncalmest unabeyances. Glistening over a rounded surface, white through the drops and cuts between various edges, slow and clear where reeds stretch its lengths, water reverberates the inner ear and contents the body with flowing. Waiting its turn at a corner, eel-curvy fish-flicking, before cascading into black below the gaze, river is together and plentiful whatever the weather or the state of the human mind. The world would not exist without certain things: bees, the moon, rivers. The mouth would pucker and shrivel without certain things: saliva, bread, rivers. The body would want for analogy without a lover, young trees, rivers. A city would be a heap of mud and timber without a market, new words, the music of a river. To live in the belief that your voice will be near again comes from being close to families, a longing, a loss, memory of laughter, and a river. A crime and its aftermath will not seep away, they will be tried because of families, eyes that shine, the need to be fed, morning birds, the consoling waters of a continual river. Dreams are not the sole escape, drugs are not enough, and meaning itself resides in how the words are translated by the body, because somewhere at the end of your street or the streets connected to your street or at the edge of your region or in your desert factualness there flows the river that is your river. Musicians could not breathe, lawyers could not count, plumbers would look foolish, without rivers. Birds could not home without the perfect grid point straggle of your river. The moon would be an unglistening boulder of choke dust without your cool gliding river. Fruit trees and the iris beds and the pongy profusion of white daisy bushes, and the higgledy-piggledy behind the glasshouse, would be an abstract expression, an insignificant other of book people, without trees that grip to the river, without bees supping on the river in infinitesimal circlets, without the hand that is your hand lifting life up from your river.