Only the most dedicated travel there. A man will take you in his red rowing boat. From the landing stage you’ll hear hammers – stones breaking. There’s distance in the eyes of each passenger. The boatman knows it. A toenail, beak, the tip of a wing is already formed in that other eye. Trees have long gone, cut for camp fires. Some stay months, digging, hammering, others summon storms, waiting for winter to bring cliffs down onto the beaches. They risk mud. There are no birds other than cannibal gulls. Waterproofs rustle, there’s occasionally a drift of coffee. In summer people bring tents, stake claims like fishermen.
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He rings me on a phone that doesn’t work. Odd words, words blocked out. He talks in sentences I hear a third of, like someone’s jamming it, the frequency hijacked or squatted. It hurts my ears, as if we’re trying to talk with dust storms, electric storms, particles interrupting, as if between us are prairies, plains, continents where radio can’t travel, waterless, over a continent insisting on silence. Restricted airspace, valleys no-one can enter, no sound wave can penetrate. Radio blackout, dead zones, places where words are undiscovered species, dry, rare, fossil words, desert flower words, dry hibernating frog words, waiting for rain words, satellites nudged out of orbit.
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An old man who’s always here at the same time walks up the road. A Help the Aged minibus parks for another. Two bags of shopping, equal weights. Two rear lights breaking. A 22 bus. Left and right. Two halves: sea and sky. Two wheels on a bike. Two answers: yes and no. One way in, one way out. Starlings. The first small flock at 16.34. A messy crescent. Pigeon, alone. Gull above the roof like chip-paper. Serious flaps of a pigeon on a mission. 16.37 no more starlings, yet. 16.44 four starlings loop and twist. 16.53 starlings scatter over the church, blessings for the pier, amusement arcades, the rides, evening confetti, evensong, prayers for wings.
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Among the vending machines, in the shadows, a bank of Lion bars, KitKat, bottled water, Nescafe, the pay phone’s earpiece hangs off the wall. Aluminium tables and chairs. A woman sits texting. I left the pub, a quick half, left the couples chatting, the old music, the library closed, through plate glass the sushi bar’s rotating counter. I’ve read nothing. The kids at the pool buy bags of sweets. Small ads for bits of furniture, old magazines. Why are there so many cars? Where did all the old wardrobes go?
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Glass dice, two shades of blue, the numbers uneven. Bought in Devon, a dice that can’t be relied on. Glass and shadow. Shades of blue. Earth made glass before man, from water, from sand, from crystals. The mirror of a pool, the mirror of metal, earth made ice, glass that feels of fingertips, glass that smells of salt or soap, birdshit, mould, rain. Glass that tastes of metal. Of whatever last ran over it. That could split your tongue.
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Murky deep, too expensive to be yellow, grey wig, white as white can be, black as the night sky, metal with water, whipped ice cream, travel agent turquoise, trampoline green, underwing grey, trekking green, rucksack black, spotlight gold. Decking green, pigeon ledge brown, office chair blue, wind scorched beige, satellite black.
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A group of people all die on the same day in different parts of the world. Death in all cases is instant and unexpected. The book will start with a baby and end with an old man. Each section will have exactly the same number of words. There will be someone from each continent, wonders of the world, stations of the cross. Although I had thought about June 16 as the day I am not sure yet - 2084?
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And then there is sex propelling you out of infancy, higher and higher on the swings, the fuel that paints signposts, makes the barstool, amplifies every drum beat or lead vocal, choosing a new pair of shoes, standing by a pool ready to dive, seeping into ripples of grass, colouring the sky of early summer. And it never leaves completely. You can’t give it up like chocolate cake or southern comfort. You watch younger men, like pictures. So there was the night on Skye, the one you met on your 21st. Ah, Patrice the photographer, the double bass player without a car. Then the fuel becomes Branflakes, a morning run, fruit salad. It doesn’t intrude on the view anymore.
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Words are keys jangling, wheels rumbling, tracks stretching over a continent joining two oceans, passing through tunnels blasted from granite where fossils have rested for millennia, over viaducts built over dangerous ravines, replacing rope bridges swung from crags to the sound of waterfalls. The kind you imagine dividing a city, buzzing through suburbs, promising anything but here, or tracks that skirt around inland lakes in valleys where mountains aren’t lodged side by side but give each other space, tracks that in places may buckle, split.
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Put a river in clay on my forehead so cold water runs through, a shoe in gold in my left hand so I can walk like an acrobat, I want the time of my children’s births engraved in marble at my centre, a silver eye for my right hand to remember the old life, give me a cloud in quartz for my eyes, a straw lark’s wing for my heart so I can sing.
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My friends were once all art students – M, C, the guy from Oxford with freckles who was so beautiful and I can’t remember his name, the guy who looked like Mick Jagger and anyway, loads of them. We used to hang out at the fine art parties, oh and little S who painted our living room bright yellow and slept on the floor after every party and created an installation of wires and lines for his degree show. And M with her Morris traveller van, always parked outside, who went out with L and who decorated her daughter’s pizza as if it was going in the Tate. Her pearly wire earrings. R, poor R, I still have the pen and ink drawing he did for me on my 20th, a cartoon of loaves and fishes. R in the Florist with his coat on inside out, R and his paintings, detailed as photos in American magazines, gloss, reflections and glass. Chrome, curved bonnets, bumpers. And I wonder if R’s dead. How he managed to survive that drive, how he ever came to terms with his father, the knife, the devil and Jesus.
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Prince. I’m in the garden with K and L, white sheets on the line, bright in the sun. It’s hot. K’s telling me how she had her moles removed for a boyfriend. Then he chucked her because he didn’t like the scars. She’s a make up artist in tv. Prince is on constantly. This is before he changes his name. 1999 is still in the distant future. Prince expands the house with his guitar, chopped up words. This song will always be the sound of that three month summer, the split, the girls, G, Mont St Michel, and my long journey there driving into a full moon.
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A, E and M, we’re coming off the Larzac plateau. Below are the gorges where the Tarn slices through limestone. Larzac. I want to live here. We’re only passing through and A’s worrying about her brakes. We’ll be driving back with nothing, soon. No cash or passports, just a letter for immigration, everything stolen from outside the cave, a cool, limestone, dark cathedral, the light stunning us back in the car park.
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It was an offhand remark by her dentist – you have small teeth, like the French – that set her off. She customised a folder, stitched envelopes together. She carries her upholsterer’s needle, a punch, sail maker’s thread. The folder springs open on library tables like a fan or car’s air filter. It’s dedicated to her grandfather, a dentist, to his sunny surgery, the tiny squares of stained glass in the windows to stare at from the chair. She’s recording the sounds of drills, noting where she is when she hears one, the name of the street, time of day, the weather. She’s making her way through Merthyr, the Rhondda. She adds photos, too, of the exact spot where she noticed the drill. She’s becoming an expert. Soon she’ll be able to speculate on make and model.
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Part of hell is always just before dawn. An old photo album. Cages with children in. The wire is hospital green. The cages go on to the horizon, where the sun is about to come up. The shaman shops for temple bells.
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Last night’s wax pointing to the sea, moss finds new ground on the bark of a sycamore. A white pebble for my daughter on her first day of school - a heron lifts it from river to sky.
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I’ve run the sponge over a tin of soap, damp, not dripping, then catch each bridle strap between it. C’s pacing the stable yard in jodhpurs and boots, horses and ponies come and go from the rides, and I’m in the tack room with a girl, cleaning. The soap mixes with dust from the horses’ coats. A row of heads over stable doors, deep litter, straw and dung, sacks of feed, a clattering concrete yard, C’s caravan. I see it now, a drive past, towards the ponds and I’m in the indoor school, bareback, clinging on with my thighs, balanced so perfectly, no reins, stirrups, I can jump anything. Round and round, the instructor, not C, keeping up the pace. I’m light, the pony’s fast, but the circle, the sawdust, the neat wooden jumps, comfortable canter, have expanded out, the roof’s lifted off, walls demolished. I’m bareback now in the graveyard, at the Gates of Paradise pass, the pony stopping at the waterfall where I can’t swim but my children will and the pony won’t gallop anymore and I heard C was dead and the boy from the stable who could jump on and off for ribbons and sugar, who was fast as Hermes, who knew so much but only his eyes let on, he’s gone, too.
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I gave up milk and sugar for Lent and began my habit of black tea, sometimes with lemon, sometimes not. Bog standard black tea, leaf tea, though, from the tin and box. Probably PG, leaves, in the sink afterwards, the change of taste when I had one in my mouth. I’d chew it, swallow. Small as a bit of skin. Lemons only went with gin, then. As a student when I was into all the wholefood stuff I discovered herbal tea. In France I drank tisane. Ginger gave me headaches. I preferred the dark fruity ones but peppermint, is always my favourite and lapsang, the taste of bonfires. I don’t have a mug for it anymore. My bone china ones are broken. I want a big bone china cup, thin and see through.
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According to Lorenzo Lotto, two men carried Christ to the tomb, two chubby children stood at the entrance, three women supported Mary and there were two onlookers. Everyone had a role to play in this entombment. The trees are dark, the earth sandy. Christ’s body is naked but his genitals are covered. There’s no blood. They seem to be hurrying as if he’s not dead, but they’re taking him to a doctor, as if they need to get him away. According to Max Ernst, Dadaville is 18 planks of wood standing upright, bleached, worm holed, woodwormed, like a fence, the sky behind painted, not real, turns to nothing, clouds disappear into lines. There’s the shape of a mountain, a frame to all but the fence that balances on a beam, itself decaying, studded, green/brown.
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This morning the sea’s in me with all its storms, its heroes, stories. I stare at it from this bed. I bring it back in bottles emptied of messages, from an unknown beach, a sea without ships but full of birds, fish, coral, plankton, weed. I pour them onto the bed. Two waterfalls, two rainstorms - and stand in the sun until I’m dry, paler, salt marks catching the light and this is how I remain, a film of crystal on my skin, the sea transformed into galaxies, the sea back to where it began.
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When he tells me these things, the boot in his head on the beach, the boy who has a gun, the friend bottled by the same gang, I want to shrink myself into a lamp, to emerge as an avenger, a stream of silk, a hologram that can appear like the voice on the phone he needs to hear.
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I can’t burn the picture with logs. Another photo of war but the baby is nearly life size lying on its side, facing everyone who opens that double page spread. What can I do? I can’t burn her. I fold her up. Nothing more.
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According to Diego Rievera, Evening Twilight at Acapulco blazes pomegranate red, apple green, but the clouds and sea are purple. There’s a crescent moon, the first star. Red stretches across the horizon in bands, diagonally, behind the clouds in reflections on the sea. The sea’s attempting to blacken, but can’t. Is green the colour of twilight, then? The only colour not pulled down to the sea?
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