Flicking through a notebook as I gather what I need for my tax form, there's a question - what languages don't have a present tense - diagram for making a kimono, note that mum lived in Rupert Brooke's old house (it can't be true), list of allotment poems. A second draft, bats in a cave.
There's an image I like, list of acts I saw at Womad in 2017 - Daymé Arocena a young woman jazz singer from Cuba, Toko Telo from Madagascar, and the legendary Toumami Diabaté from Mali who died this summer.
On the first page an exercise in dialogue including, Whatever happened to all those antiques you were selling?
I cleared my mind for Christmas photocopying outlines of birds and brushing them with gold. Paper birds flew across the front room and others, backed with pages from a dreadful novel, flew across the stairwell. I cut birds out of linen scraps and sewed them onto a tablecloth. I went down to the pier and watched them gather late one afternoon. I read my paternal grandmother's fortune telling book, its auguries and instructions for interpreting the behaviour of birds (ornithomancy).
I stopped by the sloe hedge opposite mum's yesterday evening and listened to birds, far too late I thought, it was dark, and remembered the tunnel into the hedge used by the vixen who visits mum. The dark hillocky ridge beyond, punctured by rabbits. Mist sinking into everything.
Comments