reading Rilke at 3am

as I battle the dreaded insomnia again, and again, and again in its usual cycle of (hopefully) around three months, I find myself crashing in my blue-room, a kind of study-come-boudoir with a very  comfy couch bed and a the ever-present pattern of leaves on the window from a large tree outside.  At 3am, or 4am, I'll creep in, too restless to inflict my twitchy feet on Husband, but clearly also too restless to attempt sleep.
With the light on soft and a dim view of the street, I again, as always come Autumn, pick up poetry. Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us that all is sacred, can be sublime. That he does this with reference to a God he knows but has no secular faith in, that he does this as merely a conduit to the sensual and only then the sublime, is why I must return.  He knew secular faith but could not feel it, he felt the sensual world and mastered a prose that steps back from being a knowing guide - it is his observance alone that takes us freely to our own realizations, Yes, that is so, just like that- YES!

I am stunned, always, by the modernity of him, and yet how well he fits an epoch of deep introspection, critical thought and a tradition of intellectual questioning.

All that nestled in the sheer beauty and familiarity of his prose, so new, so sure, so skin-felt and heart-drummed. To be so taken up, out and through by words still quite stuns me.
I can imagine no better antidote to 3am restlessness. If you haven't, please do.

Twintown drinking

It’s the same old pub in the same old town. He can smell the fryers out the back doing their turnover of bacon, burgers and parmas. Late arvo light shafts in and shines on the trophies and pictures of local footy players that adorn the walls. Kids are playing a desultory game of pool on the torn up table. His mouthful of fish and chips taste sharp with salt and lemon and the glass he’s holding, has stuck, hilariously he thinks, to its tacky coaster.

                ‘Fortune’s Legacy’ won today and everything is good because he’s going to leave, live like a king, maybe go to Sydney and buy an apartment and be close to his daughter and grandkids.    Everything in the pub looks different now,  haloed with an aura of sentimentality that blooms from his chest, making his beer taste like heaven and the weathered faces around seem very dear.

                His heart fills fit to bust and his glance slides along the twinkling row of bottles on the top shelf, rainbow coloured spirits and liqueurs, the sea blue of Curacao like the sea near his daughter’s home, tawny Scotch as welcoming as those soft leather armchairs in posh lobbies, Vodka that glints like diamonds!

                ‘My shout!’ he yells out deliriously, and waves his arm towards these riches of colour. ‘My shout! Anything you bloody want, me horse won the race!’

                                                                                ***

The fryer gives off a greasy smoke than always stinks up the pub with fug that smells like rancid fish.  It’s late arvo and dirty sepia light pushes past the small windows, showing the grime of a million cigarettes smoked over a hundred years.  Million- yeah right.  He was meant to win one.

                His parma is cold, the cheese congealed and the sauce a hard crust like blood on an old wound.  He reckons it was yesterdays, reheated under the Baine Marie, they do that here. Over and over the same food, the same songs on the jukebox.   Same group of kids, just different versions of them, always playing pool and drinking.  Now he’ll never bloody leave. He stares into his beer, annoyed by the smug faces around him with their same beaten look and their same stupid stories.

                He reckons he might just have enough for another pint, and filches around his pocket, where the ticket is. Stupid fucking horse.  He has three bucks in loose change left, not enough even for a pot.  The dark walls, smoke and stink close in and the clatter of voices merry with drink makes him angrier by the moment.  Time to go.

The Source

  

You were a sunny child, into tree houses and throwing pinecomb bombs, part of the rough and tumble mix of neighbourhood life. Loud, scabby-kneed, natural. Then something happened which you now realize was a catalyst in changing your shape, your personality, towards something more inclined to sit always outside the circle; you became introverted. 

In 1976 when you were five you got Scarlet Fever. It must have been bad because as Dad took you ino the local doctors you left your body and saw him carrying you, small and slumped in your flame red dressing gown. You saw the shocked faces in the waiting room and how the receptionist rushed you straight into Dr Glassspole’s office. Your face! Suppurating red sores where only an hour before your freckled skin had been.

During the six week recovery you saw the EverReady Bunny come through your pink and orange floral wallpaper, quite a few times. You saw an angel that looked like Glenda from the Wizard of OZ.  Sores popped pus into your ears and you got an ear infection. Trolls gambolled beneath your bed; fever and shakes; you rode life-sized My Pretty Ponies, shakes and fever.

From then on your ears were vulnerable to tinnitus, a low whining that made you feel as though a mosquito was trapped in your head.  You also had a form of synaesthesia, that weird little crossing of neurological pathways and misfired synapses: words could have tastes so viscerally real it made you pull faces and salivate. Once someone said ‘due diligence’ in a meeting and you gagged on the taste of Coca Cola syrup, so strong and present it was as if you had sucked Cola laybacks from the post-mix gun behind a bar.

So now you have this aural sensitivity that makes sound, especially voices, a tangle of threads to be unpicked. Chatter spools all over the floor like old ladies crochet yarns. You understand conversations better from outside the circle. You hear better from the front of the room. It got you labelled Geek years ago, something you cultivated with talk of seeing angels, demons and ghosts.  .  But they weren’t. They were people. Doing things that looked real. It just took you til adulthood to figure it out.

The first time you helped the police you tried to do it anonymously, but you were so naive about the perfect accuracy of your ‘tip’ you became a suspect. Oh irony, it has a salty sweet taste but it will always smell like brackish water.

You had slept and you had followed a woman, through brush, who seemed to be following a grey metal lock-box held out in front of her. You saw the grey van with its bong-smokers parked on the gravel in-road. You saw its license plate number. You saw the signage on an old warehouse nearby.

You saw the slick sepia river, the tree stump at its edge. You saw a beautiful woman in heels being led by a lock-box that yearned towards the water.

Then,  a week later,  her face and shining hair were on the news.