buried in something

Waking up on a hill in Brisbane when the sky is white and high, like the city is buried in something. Who can have buried us, where have they gone? No other city has contact with us today, we are a city-planet wandering in its walls. I feel my house like a boat, we are an ark, we are going down the river. Going down. The water drains from the tub. Dragging my hair away from its roots, sucking the spine. I’m in memory of pelting-rain days when it seemed all the tropics had visited at once, the lawn drowned, the garden disappeared, the dim loom of fence line was like a city of spires on the horizon at last when you gaze up the coast, I’d scarcely have heard the phone if it rang and there was only ever me and these small cities luminous in my mind, me and these paints and guitars, me and these pages. Like a cathedral high white sky makes my thoughts small. Closed into my own narrow boat on the gangway jostled with other boats to market, brimming with scented fruit, we gain the free dire deeps of the dark ocean and know it is under us by the change in sounds: engine noises. Confusion of shouting. Blessed quiet comfort of the day. Inside my vessel. Beside a fireplace in my mind. Tending a habitat. On which I fry and dissect things. As a child preparing perfumed essences from the walled garden in which we lived I knew: if you stir in a little of everything, peace rises in the jar quiet as a round gas.