Art, Autumn.

Thirty-nine degrees yesterday, then thirty-four at 9pm.  

I swam and floated the mauve line of sea under animal clouds and grapefruit segments of sunset.

Still hot.

I’m sitting with music-man as he frowns his new arrangements, and I’m reading Anais Nin, sucking juice from the words and spitting out pips.

He is stabbing at the song like sex, calling and string-hitting so fast I can’t type in time, and this thing we call a process is  not a process but an attack on our arts; I see a dartboard that we each throw at, blind drunk, faster and faster, soon something will hit and hook and be that big score, the word, the note. But in the meantime, it’s a calling out blindly.

There is an atmospheric pressure, the jostling of seasons colliding; it is it furiously hot for Autumn’s first day, and in a month we’ll all be windscreen wipers batting back water, we will be drenched gardens and rotting leaves.

But today, oh today. The burn of the air, the jostling wind, shoving out Summer for Autumn just as Autumn will rot out to Winter and Winter will lie still even as we sleep cold and dream richly, all of it underground, all of it subliminal, cold and wet silently fecund.

He sings tremulous half-notes that will soon be sustained and pure, I type blindly, as staccato as he sings, blind and blind on our keys, we are frantic exhalations. Breathe, try, breathe, pant then later, slower, softer, when the drift and eddy can happen and thought twining in the leaves and sheaves, a sifting sorting time for the gold, the copper, the veins, the proteins.  But for now, the art as impulsive action, motor skills not enough - not brain to hand, but psyche to air, and the mechanisms we have in our bodies are striving and struggling to hammer it out.

Oh this season of jostle, Autumn the best time always, reading Rilke at 3am, reading prose and thrumming out poetics, and seeing it all as if the scales have been lifted from my eyes:  this season, this love, this music, these words, the art that is here and here we are - humble and hopeless in our straight pure love that wants only to arrow out and cloud-shoot for dreams.

Aloha from Aloha street

Hop shuffle click – a soft stutter and coo as pigeons dance in the tan-bark garden made hopeful with potted plants trailing.  From the clothes line hang two feeder trays. I put seeds in. The birds come and come, flagrant in their desire to have a soft slow eve, no foraging, just a take-away dinner of treats in the tray, like a fish and chips summer supper in shiny paper. 

In a quiet moment I relax and realise that I sow: home, seeds, gardens, ideas and love.

Well not so quiet a moment really, I have Samantha Brown playing, that late eighties blonded jazzy red-lipped siren. She sings: ‘I saw a bit of silver lying in a puddle, I went to pick it up, but I didn’t want to get my hands muddy.’

I got my hands muddy for the silver, then all muddied I began to garden. I sowed a seed in the office of my Lisa, my psychologist, seeded the plants that could have wilted or rotted, sowed the seeds of separating and leaving my long marriage.

I did not know if it would grow. I had so much fear. But I feared even more a future with who he had become, and me.

I daily grieved the house I would leave, that of the first clothes-line of pinned baby clothes size ‘00000’. Oooh, those little grow-suits waiving on the line!  Oh, the painting and fixing, the joy of cracks to be filled, plaster and dust, night ghosts and the morning garden, and my dad a-jingle with advice and tools.

I have a little house now. My Aloha, my welcome, to myself and all who come.

When I water, the butterflies are seduced, diving into the smaller sprays. With lavender and rosemary, the bees come too, and on the hottest days they crawled into the dish of honey-water and sipped and slipped and I had to tease one out on the fine point of a stick.

The washing whips and flutters; I share plants with my neighbour, I pay bills and keep passwords and details like a Mother. I book the lawyer, the plumber, the candlestick maker. I do it all because I can, and that realisation is like sapphires glinting, that my mind so sharp at work can do this love-building, this making of place and time and space.

Little altars abound, here the photos, tendrils green from plants, and my dad’s ashes. He is proud, it sings in my bones and muscles as I make and heft. Here the book-nook, the typewriter, the toys, the record player.  I will sing, I will play.

And such songs, art and weaving, cooking and feeding. Phone calls long overdue now long and late; the thrumming harmonics of old friendships re-found abound, tree-high new foliage that’s root-deep in trust. Muddy at times as we churn old earth over, then green glinted gold, as leaf-blooms of voice curl and unfurl through the long and lavender night.

I feel the stars get closer, an optimism sharp as light, a tumbling cascade of dreams and plans, a meteor shower of glimmering things, soft rain of light, soft rain.

how to rebirth oneself? Maybe here

Good morning. I can hear the birds at their feeder: slim pigeon, fat pigeon and the Sparrows with names like Icarus and Shaula and Savannah and Little Stevie.

I can hear my son on the couch playing Youtube videos. He has told me to go back to bed. I have wept all night and he knows and he is being kind and also self-serving, because Youtube culcha is naughty funny grimy slinky.

So this me, now, separated, living in a little house in Aloha street. Welcome!  But how to begin again here, in this blog that was begun when I was a (mostly) happy wife, building the dream home within the old home's walls, with a man I sometimes referred to as this ship's Captain?

I left him two months ago. Tired, too tired of being the lone hand on the big boat. Tired, so tired of being lonely in a marriage with a man who who had grown complacent, entitled, and small of spirit.

So I built a smaller boat to better fit my solo hands and it has been fine, even grand at times.  My son my first mate, and on we go, rough riding but oh such views. And I thought my love and care could carry every one, and that I could cope.

In here are old blogs about the building years. I am glad to have them. I have been out of the home for two months. I left it because my ex cannot afford to move and still keep a part time roof over our son. I have left him there so that he could still be a Dad as he tries to get more work to support himself.  Two months and yesterday I found he'd ensconced a woman in for a little love-nesting while I had care of our son.


letter to my ex:

I didn’t go looking, and even when I found it my head grasped all these other ideas: oh that’s my red silk scarf and those lanyards from Tracy and my birthday party. I picked them up, but they were wrong. I saw a red shoe and picked it up thinking these things were mine, foundlings you had put together to give me. But the shoe was wrong too. Then the bra, my fingers finding this satin greasy feeling. Wrong again. Then it began to dawn on me, ‘not mine’, as I found the dress.

And in moments something clicked. Your assumption you would leave our boy with me for 5 days until new years day, and your rage when I countered that. You planned for her to be around a few days. A few pairs of undies in the basket in the study I once loved. Sleeping together. Cocooned in. The intimacy of that speaks of long build.

I have cried all evening and night. Not your concern but I will have to get my bro to help me look after our boy today, I'm tapped out.  

What you’ve done is smashed every positive memory I have in the home I left when I left you.

Wrecked it.

So, I hope for you that it worked. That in fucking her there, and having her stay, it exorcised me fully and fast.

I hope that when you lie in the bed we bought with wedding money, in the room we painted surrounded by the pictures I framed, under the chandelier that has my childhood memories, all you see is her reflected in those crystals and the gold. Her body, not mine.  I hope you can see Diane by Klimt and not remember Windsor. 

I hope that when you walk the hall along the wallpaper I chose and the pictures I filmed and framed, you see it now only as she did, that the house is quirky and that the mum and baby photo is nice.

I hope that when you sit in the backroom now you hear her voice not mine, and that the making of the shelves with my dad is eradicated by the presence of her.

I hope that the bath now is soaked in her image, a picture there of a woman drinking the coffee you made her, lapping away at your little love offering. So intimate. I hope when you sit along our son there you don’t, any more, remember him and I in that bath with bubbles and toys. Just her. No back-story any more of finding the tub on the roadside. No image of my Dad up to his knees in floorboards, or me pregnant on the toilet.

And I hope that the veranda is the same, clear of me, clear of Max, and the pear tree is no longer a story of triumph but something she just looked at.

So yes, since you fucked her and made intimate moments in the home we built and that you live in with our son I hope it worked to serve you well. I truly do. You chose exactly that. So that is what you now have. You chose to make intimacy there and I hope it resonates sweetly for you.

That house now is nothing to me, only a roof over our boy's head. Handovers at the door. I’ll return the house key so you can feel free to keep making new memories to eradicate the old ones, the ones you made with your ex and her family.

It’s a good bridge out, to exorcise the young excited couple from the home, the new parents from the home, the Max from the home. It will make selling up easier.

                                                                         ***

So there is my rancour and oh it feels good to pour it here. It is freeing. I am free, I am going to rebuild, for I am my Mum and Dad's bright strong girl with hands and shoulders for making, and love big enough to billow out the sails.