©1989, 1994, 2008

He stops singing.
The kitchen awaits a diver. It lies unmoving in the mirror, a village immersed in clear water. Rain streaks his window with fresh green oil. He stumbles from room to room, but the mirror is never empty when he returns.
He makes faces in it, till it makes faces back. Someone peeps in his window, someone with a warm eye and a warm hand, like the sun. The suburb is spruce and spick, a man in a green suit. He plays his songs to it.

Well I’m a-lyin’ on my bed honey
Been in bed an hour
Yes I’m lyin’ down on my bed , child
I been in bed an hour
Well I’m lying upon my bed, baby
I been dead an hour …

Such are his mornings. His mood is as black as a verbena seed.
He lights a joint.
The mirror turns grey. Dressing, he makes lunch early, crispy sunny bacon and curly potato slices fried in a pan of butter. He has dressed in green and yellow, he looks like a caterpillar. His guitar resonates on the tattered tablecloth. He strums it with greasy fingers, then abandons it in disgust. He washes up.
The sun shines through the soap bubbles and into the mirror, to vanish forever like children into a rock.
Death, he sings, glad the sunshower of youth has ended. Life, a dying smile in a closing oubliette. He craves such forbidden things as his identity is fragile. Sitting carefully at the table, pencilling chord symbols over the words, he forgets the tune. The clock ticks in the mirror. The house is shrinking.
Out he goes to potter in the garden, sniffing the herb flowers, forking the potato beds, listening to that trumpeter play Audrey two streets away, nibbling chickweed and purslane, sitting like a child with damp earth between his toes, humming Peruvian laments, making inane guitar noises, guzzling paprika-covered peanuts, smoking and breathing in deeply a vomit-mist of guilty envy at the sight of passing girls, retrieving a time when all these things made a spring cosmos of their own; then it’s noon, and he stands perfectly still.
He opens his ancient Songbook at random.

‘They Moved Like Dancers’ by T. Richard Fry

© 1973

Two girls stood and talked outside my house
They moved like dancers
My house was empty save me and my dreams
Which moved like dancers
Inside my house there was fear and shame
I moved like dancers
Within my house I lived half-insane
Removed like dancers
Two girls stood and talked outside my house
I sought for answers
They moved like dancers

When the junk mail comes, he watches the rain on t.v. as he has only one letter, the one from you. He reads over it as he watches, sipping tequila. He doesn’t feel famous anymore. A Nell Dorr model, still young, watches him from above the mirror. She is another mirror. He doesn’t dare catch her eye, she may smile. The rain has congealed on the window like hair gel.
I don’t think we would be good for each other, you wrote – he doubts if you remember now. Things have changed, for you. He smokes as he reads. He thinks of ringing your number but goes back to the song he’s written about you, changing the lyrics and making a hash of writing it out in music notatation. But he sings something else instead.
What does it matter now, even to the mirror. It was fifteen years ago.
A shadow at the window? He runs to see. Just a bird, pecking at the flyscreen. A crow. Never more.
The window mirrors the sun-bleached t.v. screen and the mirror mirrors them both. He gazes into the mirror but is lost when he looks away, unless he puts his face very close. He dares not. Wherever he turns it follows. The newspaper sprawls at his feet, smouldering with lies.
The doorbell doesn’t ring.
Only the mailman comes near the door, with the dole cheque: he doesn’t give a shit who this is, but then he probably doesn’t know. His head is bald except for a line of hair trained across it like a strict creeper.

The very thoughts of your head are numbered.

The singer can’t watch t.v. too long as the newsreader can see him. He knows she can’t – but didn’t she twist her lower lip for him then?
He drinks himself sober as the dawn. Night comes in, in great sobs from the west, like a dying mother. Now he writes, immersed in wordless melancholy, to the inscrutable flames of his open fire.

It was night. The moon hovered above the silent field, casting a blue-grey blanket upon the dark rushes, where the stream ran unseen in a stone-cluttered channel. The trees stood motionless, painted by the cold rain.

Rue springs out of the windowbox. Its scented flames are slow orgasms, sunless words that make him cry. You are gone, but perhaps you were never there at all. The flames of the fire play like a forest sunrise through the bars of a cell. The wind high above chants an Indian dirge. It is under the house, carolling like a piano played backward, weeping like a lost child, loosening the foundations. He sees its shadow at the window.He pushes his guitar through the pane and burn it on the fire. He cooks tiny potatoes in the coals, black but green inside. Like bonfire night all those years ago. Life made sense then. Be yourself, they said, but took his self away. He thinks of Lear, and Mother Courage’s mute daughter. The sky is red with warning. Night, burning.
There are no tears on the page, only the time before tears, when empires tremble.

I am a whirling sand grain
Glittering like a star
A universe
So far

He is a snake coiling itself out of time like a clockspring. The rain falls in ringlets like your hair. He goes out in it, spouting poetry to the elements like Walt Whitman.
(His 30 year old neighbour, who minces like a little girl, thinks he’s funny.)
When you talked, the city rustled; when you quarreled, it roared. Each lamp-post was fresh from your paintbrush … the grass under his feet was still wet. His empire seethes, his bonfire.
“Why do you destroy me?” he asks of the bonfire.
She refuses to answer, but the great termite-hill of her mind, built up over years and invincible against all human attackers, trembles before him. She looks down, the shy look that makes him want to take her in his puny arms as if he were clasping himself in his own loneliness. They drink cider again. It tastes like snow-water from Mars. Reproach in her huge and beautiful eyes.
“Sorry.” He is too clever, an anaconda in a tangle.
We set ourselves at opposite ends of the sofa, like cautious magnets.
“Why?” he asks.
“You never give up.”
“Nor do you.”
Her head quivers all the time when she talks.
“You loved me.”
“Crime?” he says, feeling guilty.
“I don’t love you.”
Arrow through the heart.
“Why?” He looks down, apologetically, ventriloquially. He hasn’t got much closer. But she now acknowledges that he loved her!
“Your – behaviour is inappropriate, Terry.”
He ignores the ‘advice’. “You – you were like a sister to me.”
She looks up, surprised.
“Well, not only that – ”
No answer, just looks down at her purple dress and her quivering hand with its wreath of grey smoke.
“Please – “
She looks up.
He repeats himself. What can be said? Why bother now? She is afraid of me. I am afraid of her.
“I’m afraid – ”
“So am I.”
“But – ”
“Good-bye.” she says, to change the subject.

He goes, but not to the woods anymore. Up, he murmurs, barely able to understand.
The dark is absolute. He wakes in reverberating blindness. No one is here. No one rings.
They fall into each other like two empty mirrors, two silvered nothings: it is hot in the earth, like a star. Migraine, headstorm. Quest for the headwaters of the pomegranate. Feels rather sick …
He is not dying of solanine poisoning. Instead, he dives into his best work, loud under the neighbour’s window:

Running round the rolled-gold lighthouse
As the world turns slightly wrong
Selling all out to the morning
I could make a baby tease
I could float on down with feathers
But I’d never get along
And a bird might fly forever
If it hadn’t any song
I see my face in the gravel
I stare where I scare the breeze
I blink at folded circuses
I never paid to see
I think in soldered circles
So break them if you please.
But I know it’s marked with a black cross
I’m too sick of it to flee
And I think I’m waiting for the night wind
To blow away the sea.

She or he throws things at him in the end, till the mirrored sunset sets like liquid steel. The harvest moon rises, dripping like washed butter.
Tomorrow they may take him away. He will then be free of what is his. He tells the neighbour, but she’s so much like you, she can’t listen.
She’s scared he’ll kill her. He can’t even kill himself.
He could not grow up while you were with him. He never wanted to.
He could never hate you.

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