There is no way out
of this world of ours.
With my heart in torment
I went into the mountains -
even there I heard the stag cry
Fujiwara Shunzei -In Autumn
The garden that once grew outside my flat is gone.
When I moved here, a year and a bit ago, it was a long tangled patch of high, waving brown grass, dead but still standing in the solid summer heat, buzzing in a haze of flies, wasps and gnats, long-legged spiders loping in its roots, a tangle of gauzy weeds at its ragged edges, grown up, wild, to the height of the windows.
In one corner, a raddled laural tree stood, fifteen-foot high, spreading over the garden and the street, its elephant-skin flaking roots rippling in knots before delving into the earth, bursting through the granite wall that seperates my garden from the tarmac.
Sitting in an L-shape, hugging the corner of the building in which I live, the garden's side, the kicking foot of the L, was a chaos of mud and weed, of broken bricks - ochre and scarlet lumps stamped with shape and form -hanging with plastic bags, discarded crisp packets, and half-crushed lager cans that filled with soupy water. In the shadows of the tenement, beetles lingered, green glass shards lay like knives dropped after a slashing.
In the past two weeks, I have had it all destroyed.
This year I have survived a mild brush with cancer, and passed my driving test. I have fallen off bicycles and skinned my arm down to raw plasma and pink watery blood-dripping: the dappled scarring lie like white freckles on my sallow thin arms.
I have had a growing, bleeding white lump removed from my face - it pinged as it hit the surgeons concave silver bowl, and sucked as it was pulled with a 'thwop' from my nose - and I have given blood and piss and saliva and samples of my insides and been passed and given breezy all-clears and calming conclusions, even if some days the all-clears and conclusions were unwanted.
I have fallen asleep on a girl's hot soft stomach on the pebble beach of a far island, the sun burning again on my scarred nose and flesh, and I smiled as I heard nothing as nothing moved on that island, a sliver of hot slate dipped into the Atlantic, my own avalon reached before my death.
I have written poems and short stories and begun a novel, and I've drunk too much.
But in the past two weeks I have had my garden destroyed. The men came and the mountainous hedge which darkened the windows of my bedroom was uprooted from the soaking black earth, and a deep trench appeared where its roots ploughed the earth, and the next day,walking back from work, I saw a flat brown fence in its place, rigid and fixed.
Next went that forest of grass, thistle and weed - dug up and dumped in a skip, replaced by a flattening off, a plane, a plain of black soil and stones, a muddy plateau which quickly sank to slurry and slime in a cold October shower.
The tree was mutilated next, its upper branches lopped, bleeding white sap as stumps dot its trunk with their pure white discs. Its roots were hacked and the wall repaired, but I decided it should live - during summer days, its leaves shake and shimmer and their reflections enliven and dance across the white walls of my living room. The tree stays.
But now the garden is gone. No life lives in its L-shaped land: grits and stones and flagstones neatly delineate its width and length. A new fence, and a new border snug to the tenement, remain to be painted. No spiders now tingle into my house, no beetles blithely roll across my floors. Birds do not flutter and nest in its tangle, and now only leaves drift on its hard rocks, glassy rubble and sheer arid faces.
At night I can still hear the motorway rumble, and the couple upstairs make love, and people shouting and laughing on the street, and the sound of gas and water and electricity running through the guts of my dead house.
All surrounded by my new desert - which I may yet call peace.
of this world of ours.
With my heart in torment
I went into the mountains -
even there I heard the stag cry
Fujiwara Shunzei -In Autumn
The garden that once grew outside my flat is gone.
When I moved here, a year and a bit ago, it was a long tangled patch of high, waving brown grass, dead but still standing in the solid summer heat, buzzing in a haze of flies, wasps and gnats, long-legged spiders loping in its roots, a tangle of gauzy weeds at its ragged edges, grown up, wild, to the height of the windows.
In one corner, a raddled laural tree stood, fifteen-foot high, spreading over the garden and the street, its elephant-skin flaking roots rippling in knots before delving into the earth, bursting through the granite wall that seperates my garden from the tarmac.
Sitting in an L-shape, hugging the corner of the building in which I live, the garden's side, the kicking foot of the L, was a chaos of mud and weed, of broken bricks - ochre and scarlet lumps stamped with shape and form -hanging with plastic bags, discarded crisp packets, and half-crushed lager cans that filled with soupy water. In the shadows of the tenement, beetles lingered, green glass shards lay like knives dropped after a slashing.
In the past two weeks, I have had it all destroyed.
This year I have survived a mild brush with cancer, and passed my driving test. I have fallen off bicycles and skinned my arm down to raw plasma and pink watery blood-dripping: the dappled scarring lie like white freckles on my sallow thin arms.
I have had a growing, bleeding white lump removed from my face - it pinged as it hit the surgeons concave silver bowl, and sucked as it was pulled with a 'thwop' from my nose - and I have given blood and piss and saliva and samples of my insides and been passed and given breezy all-clears and calming conclusions, even if some days the all-clears and conclusions were unwanted.
I have fallen asleep on a girl's hot soft stomach on the pebble beach of a far island, the sun burning again on my scarred nose and flesh, and I smiled as I heard nothing as nothing moved on that island, a sliver of hot slate dipped into the Atlantic, my own avalon reached before my death.
I have written poems and short stories and begun a novel, and I've drunk too much.
But in the past two weeks I have had my garden destroyed. The men came and the mountainous hedge which darkened the windows of my bedroom was uprooted from the soaking black earth, and a deep trench appeared where its roots ploughed the earth, and the next day,walking back from work, I saw a flat brown fence in its place, rigid and fixed.
Next went that forest of grass, thistle and weed - dug up and dumped in a skip, replaced by a flattening off, a plane, a plain of black soil and stones, a muddy plateau which quickly sank to slurry and slime in a cold October shower.
The tree was mutilated next, its upper branches lopped, bleeding white sap as stumps dot its trunk with their pure white discs. Its roots were hacked and the wall repaired, but I decided it should live - during summer days, its leaves shake and shimmer and their reflections enliven and dance across the white walls of my living room. The tree stays.
But now the garden is gone. No life lives in its L-shaped land: grits and stones and flagstones neatly delineate its width and length. A new fence, and a new border snug to the tenement, remain to be painted. No spiders now tingle into my house, no beetles blithely roll across my floors. Birds do not flutter and nest in its tangle, and now only leaves drift on its hard rocks, glassy rubble and sheer arid faces.
At night I can still hear the motorway rumble, and the couple upstairs make love, and people shouting and laughing on the street, and the sound of gas and water and electricity running through the guts of my dead house.
All surrounded by my new desert - which I may yet call peace.
