square vertices
Collected up nicely and neatly in a box. Packed in quietly. Almost as if you would never have known we were here. an industrious mouse, pattering away, collating objects. Leading to a house full to the brim of all that is decorative and tasteless. Musted with memory and peppered by cinnamon warmth.
I breathe in and can almost taste such scantly sparse molecules now; the scent of fine dust on cut-glass, the years of mould creeping slowly into wooden parquet floors, stifled by thick woolen rugs greyed by the passage of time. The choking smoke of coal fired heating and the obsidian glow emanating from the hearth and store. From a time when a house had a pantry and a larder to keep foodwares cold.
From an age when it was possible to visit and be wheeled up the cracked stony concrete path, diagonally slicing through patches of rough and tumble, we did. The slaked fenceposts at the front, holding the most bare of wire frames together, slung haphazardly over by a friendly local more than fifty years past, all splattered with shadow underneath the dappledown tree, with its wiry fronds and fingerpad leaves, weaving lightdrops on silken grass to run hands through.
Lemongrass and sorrel, thick bushes laced with cuckoospit, earthworms and birdsong. Silver threads of light pierced the faint fabric between plantstem and buildingside, drenched in the damp, picking away at the end of the spectrum. She would sit, amongst the free-running grasses and seeds and the cockerel crowing morning song, and peel potatoes, feeding their starchy slip between her timestung hands. The vegetables would glisten under the hazy light as gems, water whiteblooming with starch. Yet still the peel would compost with nay a whisper as months passed, ready to peel the potatoes once more. A stubby woodhandled and riveted knife for the job, same for peeling the thick and undulating runner beans, a job repeated with grace and intimate knowledge… whilst the milkbottle wire was cleaned and brushed up, and the sundial shadow turned ever on.
And with every further turn of the shadow, the same colours echoed over and over, over and over again. The piercing blue midday sky, the deepest black and cream Mackeson Stout, and the whitepainted walls surrounding leaflicked green broadways, bemoaning the call of yellowflecked sand, idly hissing in the breeze. Further shadows meant less, though. Less short walks to the village shop, the fear of not knowing what lies at the end of the road. The knowledge that the surroundings are changing - the dry stone walls and lawns scuppered by red-hot poker disappear even now, to make way for affordable, sustainable housing. Local in style. New. This is no place for elemental sandstone, flint and chalk, and bare feet on hot tarmac. No. This is the twenty-first century.
She would love to sit cushioned in chairs, watching the insects sing on a summer air. Hours would pass, and she would just watch the grass sway and sigh. The shore was now too far. Times came when even the grass was too distant, and the carpet and warm slippers became too much of a draw. She surrounded herself with bright green plastic flowers, unmade beds, windchimes and clocks. Translucent and pearled perspex wildfowl. Candle-powered chimes, packs of straws and bottles of the sweetest lemonade, slowly losing fizz. Mallowcakes on a paper doily, hot steaming tea prepared in bone china teacups, and dark-brown glass plates and bowls. But lemonades can only keep their sparkle through a short passage of time.
It grew ever colder. Friends passed by less often, and the dust settled on quirky ornaments enough to place the day between tea and toast and cold ham sandwiches. Time passes, voices creak and etch their words instead of gliding smoothly from lung to air. And one day, square vertices provide the last dance. To think of the hours, or the days. To think of how it was passed, how no-one came. How no-one listened, no-one knew. How so. How inches and sparks drained away and into the fabrics of floor and time.
I imagine it now, under blanketlayers of thick snow. How they carried you for the final time. Past dusty, gaudy and tacky. Past the florist’s foam and wire flowers. The teasets on display, the china. The black and white television, a sink stained from decades of wirescoured use. The tablecloth and gently pastel chairs in a tobacco-stained room, emblazoned with chintz. Out through a green and glass door, seeing the last coal scuttle and curtain-obscured rooms.
And how the last visions of yours and mine are the same. Your final passage, down the long broken concrete path. Along past bushes and through the arches, dashed with flecks of colour. The wall of lush pink, red and yellow roses planted with care, tended to with intimate knowledge. They provided the sewn detail against pillows of snow, with thick green and woody stems and mountainous thorns. Today, we remember.
I long to hold one select stem. To feel the torpor, to see in the mind’s eye the soft light and melting snow immersing rich velveteen petals, observing the passage of time. And then to watch each slowly crisp and wither. As we are only temporary. We are only.
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