I had my hair cut last week right here on the stone veranda. Now, a diligent wattlebird strand by strand extracts the scattered silver filaments off moss. I find it heartening to think that this soft most dispensable part of myself could help Spring’s best, next brood hatch a fraction less harshly out into this world.
It’s the answer to all our questions, to all our deep, dearest swerves. The annihilations we called duty, pleasure were — in the long run — only annihilations. All along, all along, we were locked from the best of our cells. We practised book-keeping when we should have been breath-taking; stock-taking when there was time to take stock; damming and dreaming when all we were asked to perform was a dance from that part of ourselves awake in uncancellable rhythms.
I filled my pockets with the weight of a day’s long pain and trudged to the edge of a barnacled pier — not to throw myself off but to kill myself thought by thought by thought to the end of time. I failed in the freeze, as the chill sun set, hopelessly unable to see what I meant, and marooned in that zone between iced and unthawed, where all I could do was to find in myself one thought at a time — and thought by thought to the dead-end of time — a single good reason to come back to life once more. I failed, but in the freeze of twilit sea air and in the canvas quiet of so much intricate natural noise I realized, with my hands, that pockets could never be filled by that sort of emptiness, and that dusk in a way can be another kind of dawn — if you’re lucky — and that home, if you want one, must be built out of nothing with hard-heart-felt questions and barn-nail thinking, thought by thought to the end.
In this strange August wind, no one is left alone. It celebrates with its hissing all the world there is still left to go. Clouds are resculpted in its image: not the aëry fancy of poets but muscular knots of force, like fists. At ground level its whistling search parties comb through every single leaf of grass and tussock, to prove the essence of its substance right to the limits of finesse. If I followed the wind out into open fields and challenged it by standing tall into space, it would punch me at the knees, circle in voiced and unvoiced kingdoms, assemble sky-high columns of pressure on vulnerable points, whip the light from my eyes into huge, eerie billboards, give me just one other good reason to live on.