Sparrows

Sparrows dart round these chambers, never knowing what they will do: where will they fly or perch? The nostrils prick at odours, the mouth tastes flavours. Memory singed long ago. How boring other people's sparrows seem when they're not your own, when magnified – as they usually are – to a stature they may not deserve. It's the same with thoughts, with loves. Never in the same room, always someplace else. Recalling; thinking; questioning: what would van Gogh have made of the sunflowers in Italy? Of Italy itself – the Italian countryside?

Read and write...wonder...sparrows perch, fly.

Picture credit: Sparrows and Camellias in the Snow, 1838, Hiroshige (source: WikiArt).

Attributed to reading White Egrets by Derek Walcott.

Written June 2022.

City

A city low on nightmares (though with a fondness for mythological monsters), of dreamlike beauty, of love and betrayal, of rumour. Twilit and dangerous, described as having damp, cold, narrow streets through which one might get lost, or find oneself in an abandoned palazzo, which must surely be a Venetian principle, just as honeymooners in gondolas are another.

A city of dust, of time, of fog. A city ceased to be seen, that in winter chooses invisibility, all the while crying (in an echo of JB's) “Depict me! Depict me!”

Picture credit: Venice with the Salute, c.1840-1845, J M W Turner (source: WikiArt).

See Watermark: An Essay on Venice by Joseph Brodsky.

Written June 2022.

Language, Observation

In my book-burdened heart I see coincidence, everything linked. Books, passion-filled, contain vivid image and smell; a late sunbeam gilding their spine as my mind is carried away, far away to the land of the book or to my own past. African villages, shacks roofed with tin, hills a Chinese scroll, gulls circling inland. A wood-pigeon's coo disturbs such imagery and takes me to Middleton-On-Sea. Language, observation; that's what characters – real and fictional – are made. Affliction, wounds stitched into them and questions curled like sea-horses; sunken galleons rumoured – with skulls and treasures – to be there but never found, too many fathoms deep.

Picture credit: Seahorses in Morecambe, Eric Gill (source: WikiArt).

After Derek Walcott, written June 2022.

Ma Kilman's Bar

I cannot see the island's geography as clearly as I can Ma Kilman's bar: NO PAIN CAFÉ ALL WELCOME, with its wrinkled paint, bead curtain and neon sign endorsing Coco-Cola. Blind Monsieur Seven Seas sitting on a crate outside speaking in old African babble to his sharp-eared dog; shifting as the day ages his box to the shade. Philoctete, a wounded fisherman with foam-white hair, in the rumshop window staring out to sea, periodically anointing his itching, tingling shin with ice or Vaseline.

Picture credit: West Indies Divers, 1899, Winslow Homer (source: WikiArt).

See Omeros by Derek Walcott. 

Written June 2022.