Piece in Ekphrastic Review

I haven’t looked at the Ekphrastic prompts in a while, but this Pissarro brought back too many memories not to join in.

Thank you to Lorette at Ekphrastic Review for selecting my piece of prose. You can read all of the chosen pieces here.

That was then

A rain of light, a jewel box, Paris nights on the grands boulevards were brilliant then. Roof slate, slick-glittered purple and midnight blue, and the hot gold of music poured from brasseries, peals of laughter, and the click-clack of hoofs, water-splashing.
The echoes lingered long, so long I heard them before they faded. Les filles were the same, the paint, the pose, the clatter of plates, chink of glasses, and the brassy yellow light, smelling of choucroute and bright red lobster corpses. Waiters, white shirted, black tied and aproned, swooped like swallows, and in the dark all cars were Tractions.
But the vibrant, multi-layered social architecture of the Impressionists, Piaf, Simenon, Jean Gabin and Zola was changing. In the streets behind the glitter, the girls waiting in dark doorways, cats at windows, washing hanging out to dry, music blaring, voices shouting in scènes de ménage, all were slowly being tidied away, pushed out beyond the périphérique into the soulless suburbs, so the rich of the world could have the playground of lights, the rain slicking off purple slate all to themselves.
What was once a city of squalor and beauty, misery and merveilles, a noisy colourful cacophony of sounds and smells, of rain and refuse in streets where satin shoes and buttoned boots trod, where urchins followed red balloons, is now a cemetery inhabited by ghosts, as at home here as in Dubai, New York, London.
They have it all now, squeezed of life and colour, cleansed of its ordinary people, workers, families, old folk with their chairs out on the pavements, babies in prams, dogs, street vendors and prostitutes. The argot of the titis parisiens has been replaced by sanitised interactions in the universal language of wealth, and the Paris of Maigret, Montand and Monet is dead.

Waking

Waking

I woke from a dream of hunters, to see a pheasant and his harem picking their way though the green-brown meadow.

I woke from a dream of a sinister wave of men in khaki and orange, rippling through the garden of my childhood. The garden colours were vividly sombre, the colours of wet autumn, brown-stalked and new frog-green grass.

And I ran, with my youngest child, whirling a stick and shouting, you shall not pass (or dream equivalent), until she stopped me with a whisper, a deer hiding with her baby, don’t disturb them, but I did, and the mother darted into the open, and I whirled and screamed, don’t you dare shoot, not here, not in this garden.

Because it was a dream, the hunters emerged, crept past me, cowed, and I took away their guns and spat in their faces words of vitriol beneath the grey-brown sky and the dripping trees, and tore down the signs they had placarded, insane, that showed the ferocious nature of all wild things, a deer with bloody vampire fangs, and my heart was still as full as the clouds.

I woke and watched the pheasants, glossy bronze boy and girls in willow-leaf and wished, a vain wish, that they would stay among the brown-green stalks, not wander beyond the dark stream.

From dreaming dreams of warfare,
I woke to find refugees,
picking meagre seedheads
by the red-berried hedge.

I woke to find refugees
released from cages,
tossed into the autumn,

picking meagre seedheads.
From chick, fed through metal bars,
the wild tastes different

by the red-berried hedge,
and they cannot know, their liberators
have them in their sights.

Borghesia

Borghesia

It starts with a cat and ends with a cat. The story is a succession of cats that pick their graceful way through this quiet family drama of a quiet middle class family in a middle class neighbourhood of Rome.
I read it first, years ago, and opening the book, immediately remembered the first line, like A Tale of Two Cities or Pride and Prejudice, a memorable line about how a woman who had never had a pet was given a cat.
The Italian language is poetry, and Natalia Ginzburg sings and paints it with an unequalled purity and limpidity. Her characters, feline and human, reach out to us across years, across the sofa, the kitchen table, the roof terrace beneath the Roman sun. In quiet, unassuming prose, the blue and gold of Italian sunlight, her brush strokes create characters, not sketches, rounded and real.
She never stumbles, never misplaces a word, her prose is radiant, and this small story of births and deaths, of so many partings, lives never quite fully lived, touches me deeply, perhaps because I knew Roman families like this, at that time, and part of me wishes I had joined them.

Famiglia, Natalia Ginzburg, Einaudi 1977.

for dverse.

The End

The dream I had last night/this morning. Otherwise, I slept quite well.

The End

And it came to pass that division and sub-division splintered all the world’s societies into groupuscules, and the word unity was removed from all the dictionaries. Men had fought one another over land, then over oil and religion, historical and imagined grievances, and then over water, until the earth was criss-crossed with scars, cracked and wrinkled.
The men hunkered down behind their walls and wire, and each group brought back one of a multitude of gods to worship, and they let themselves be ruled by their god’s living representatives. Each god had his own code of laws, and the only common law was that the earth belonged to men.
So there were no more women, only birthers, no more fauna, only cattle, no more flora, only crops. There were only men to rule them, and in the words of one of their gods, in the darkness bind them.
Men had fought over the most precious resources of the earth and tainted them all. They had stolen, soiled, and spoiled everything that was beautiful in the red lust that blinded their eyes. They had diverted and dried up the great rivers, destroyed the great forests, poured concrete over the green grass, scattered the carcases of rockets, missiles and satellites through the atmosphere while populations starved. They tried to snatch the stars from the sky and failed.
There was one thing of beauty that remained, a reminder of what had been, and what could never be. Birds. They taunted the men with their freedom, their graceful, weightless dance. They sang songs that no machine could match, and they went where they would, clinging to the sky when there were no more trees.
In their rage and envy, their anger at what eluded them, so simple, so stupid, so fragile, yet so inimitable, the men united one last time. Across the world, in each tiny beleaguered nation, each miniscule city state, the priests and preachers hurled the order from pulpits, to massacre the devils in feathered form that mocked men and their heavy boots that could never leave the ground.
And when the last little body lay limp and broken on the ground, the earth gave a final shudder and made an ending.
The plaster and paint gods knew nothing, and their bewigged and bedizened mouthpieces would never have understood, that the fretwork of frail and hollow birdbones held up the coping of the sky, and birdsong was the lifeblood of the earth.

Notes on sleeping, or not

Notes on sleeping, or not

When I was younger, I slept like a cat, woken at the slightest change in the baby’s breathing, not knowing that baby sleep is still as death.
Later, it was for toddler nightmares, falling out of bed, wailing for a drink of water. The chain reaction through the woken siblings that would take a while to settle.
When all the babies were grown, the toddlers’ broken arms healed, the creatures under the bed forgotten, I would wake at the sound of distressed dog, the man that comes in the night fears. then, when he was old, for the distress of the old.
When the old dog was at peace, I still slept light, listening for the agitation of young dogs, bemused at life inside a house, disturbed by the rustlings of the outdoor creatures.
Now I listen out for the straining chug of the fridge, rattling like the motor of an old car on the point of death. I get up to turn down the thermometer, wait for the sigh of relief, the slowing of the rattle to silence. If I could, I would pat the fridge on the head, scratch behind its old ears, cover it with a blanket and watch it settle back into sleep.
The fridge is old. Tired. These last days it has struggled in vain to keep the temperature out of the red zone. Defrosted and unburdened, the heat was still too much. We thought we were assisting at its death throes.
But after a last, interminable night of stifling heat, after turning the thermostat down twice to ease its suffering, the episode has passed. The air is breathable again, and the heat is slowly evacuating from inside the house.
The fridge hums gently to itself, and though the thermostat is still set low, we are out of the red and into the green zone again.
I wonder what gift a fridge would appreciate?

To the light sleeper,
the anxious,
the everlasting mother,
there will always be a reason
to walk the night house,

to listen to sighs and shuffles,
the scratching of mice,
a dreaming cat,

to stand by the open window
and listen to the night,
beneath the sky’s
silent canopy of stars.

Poppies

How the poppies glow! Baked earth scorches, brown-stalked, criss-crossed with tracks. Smell of fox. A clump of cottony hair, and a hare crops grass high on the ridge. Crows shout commands to unseen troops, kites scream like whizz-bangs, and the poppies burn. A lone oak remembers cows and green pasture, the pond, in deep shrouds, shaded and sheltered by willows and dogwood, plum, cherry and medlars, remembers hooves on muddy banks. Fox comes now and hares, tunnelling though the bramble brakes. Kites scream remembering nothing of any interest, and the poppy-blaze spreads year after year.