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To my mother this pungent steam signalled a seasonal chore, but I, like Marie Antoinette, am playing countrywoman and January is marmalade month.
I am a billionaire of time and silence. Shall I choose, today, to sing, draw, gaze at the unwearying beauty of the view? Shall I feel moved to iron a sheet, paint a wall, scrub a floor?
My fingers are sticky, stiff, swollen with cutting. It’s back to basics, doing it the hard way, the Zen of preserving—I become one with fruit, knife, wooden spoon, the heavy pan her mother gave to mine.
Whispery sugar shifts in sparkling dunes and dies like snow into the seething cauldron. Windows mist and seal me in sweetness with a bitter edge.
Thick gush into glass. The molten-metal stream clots, taking its time, and cools to stasis. Ranked jars stand glowing in fluorescent light.
Amber with its suspended life: fibres of fruit, small-pored vermilion slivers, colours of copper, gold, daffodil, sunrise, fire.
Surrey. A garden, black and aromatic. Woman and cello on the lawn and somewhere an invisible bird.
We are all born for death, including Beatrice and the nightingale. Only the music aims at immortality:
the programmed throat endlessly reproduced, the antique instrument, the record updated with each new technology.
The cello hums its undersong to the solo bird, whose voice is surprisingly loud - a choirboy's effortless unvibrated treble.
With shut eyes she listens to herself accompanying the legendary singer that seems to fit its notes to hers
in a coincidence of languages. In truth, like us, it speaks its own vocabulary of need to its own kind.
In the pissing contest, Jack won. Ann and the girls, secretly shocked, kept their faces expressionless. That hot summer Jack went along Duck Lane with a box of matches. Jim followed, beating hedge-fires out. Ann wondered: What if? Didn’t God speak from an orange blazing bush?
Hotter, hotter the desert. Air like transparent flame and embers underfoot. No God there with Jim crisped in the furnace of his tank. Jack soldiered on to Sicily, Italy, back home, a hero.
Remembrance Sunday— cold brilliance. Jack, always chilly, is swaddled, poppy pinned on his woolly hat like a head-wound over blank eyes. He has forgotten how to speak. And what things does he remember? Ann pushes the wheelchair grimly along the uneven tarmac.
Tight as asparagus or exotic grain the budded stems parcelled in darkness. A long way from the hedged fields of home, the sieved sea-wind.
Oh, these have a raging thirst after their journey. White or yellow petals thin as skin unfold, turn to six-pointed stars so small
you can’t imagine them dancing. Even in their native breeze they would only shiver. Breath of spring, fugitive scent of honey,
vanilla, sap, in a minor key. But the centrally heated stillness will crisp them. Tomorrow’s sun will light a host of little dead faces.
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