taking care of the place
the river path
I ate my muesli on the river path and watched red insects furred with a fringe of legs investigating the slowly-rotting wood. The boatshed is held up by two felled but still rooted trees. The motorway roars a few hundred metres south, it carries a siren past. I saw a speedboat race upstream and then, twenty minutes later, return, in silence, with its engine cut: they were travelling sideways, simply letting the water bring them. As I watched, the man took his eyes off his wife’s hand on the tiller and folding his arms like a well-cared-for corpse he lay back full length in the bottom of the boat. The peace of people’s secret ambitions. After a long winter of empty skies the trees are full of song. Overnight I was reading Jonathan Franzen’s heartfelt but wry essays about the murder of migrating birds. I honour him. There should be many many more ducks and birds on this river, my friends say, at this time of year. What we have made very little resembles what I know of life. Sitting in a mossy hollow feeling a speckle of sun on my shoulders I realize I have taken refuge in the countryside and may never go back. Spend the rest of my life foraging round them and dwelling in the treetops like an airborne burrow: a nest ~ I imagine visiting cities like a honeybee to carry the gold dust away on my very many legs, darting in and droning away again, making a child’s drawing of a flower.
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Finally, Cathoel! I’m so glad you’re posting on your blog again. I don’t know what it is, but I’m much more inclined to read your posts here than on FB (although FB did take me here, this time.) House of Lovers seems a more appropriate, homely place for your beautiful prose poems. You seem to be travelling quite a bit & your observations about the places you’ve been are consistently acute and poetic. I have just returned from 3+ months in East Gippsland and I know what it is to take refuge in the countryside. I would go back, but… but I’m seeing if there’s any gold dust to be had in Melbourne. Lots of love to you, Vera x
Please tell me which Franzen essay/s you were reading. I’ve read The Discomfort Zone & How to be Alone. ‘My Bird Problem’, the last piece in the former book, is excellent.
Thank you, Vera, I’m so glad you like this format. More space for pictures, for one thing. It’s really good to hear from you again & I love your kind words about this writing. Looking forward to more of your poetry as well.
Gippsland sounds like a salty dream from this distance. The stony heart of Europe. The Jonathan Franzen collection I have with me is Farther Away, found it in a library in Copenhagen and have chased it down via an English-language bookstore; the particular essays I think you’d love on this topic are The Chinese Puffin, and The Ugly Mediterranean. The Chinese Puffin, which begins with his affection for a puffin-shaped plush golf-club cover and leads to a tour of the factory that made it and bleak bird-watching sessions with beleaguered local ecologists, is particularly horrifying. We’re all indicted.