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Peewit, Dad called it, or Old maid. No reason why, except that his dad did, and his. They used the easy place-bound words, the shibboleths, names that are sly
soundings for tongues that don’t belong here. All Dad’s peas were pays, his beans were byuns, he always said I cossunt not I can’t. His words were oral histories,
like when I’m not became the much more blunt I byunt, echoes of older tongues, like lapwing, lappewincke, Anglo Saxon’s læpi wince , words that meant
it raised and dropped its crest, nothing to do with wings. The name we give this bird - lipwingle, lymptwigg, peesie, wallock or wallop, chewit, pywipe, horneywinks -
places each of us, tells where we first saw the easy blink of their deceit tumbling white and black above our childhood’s fields like blossom blown from peas,
like salt and pepper for our tongues, holding that smack of home, one of the fifty tell-tale names for flapjack.
In Olduvai, before men started knapping tongues to hammer, edge and point, I was there waiting and heard the first flake fall.
I’ve summoned river spirits; Tiddalik, the Lorelei, Rusalki, Kawa no Kami… None came, though I called in their tongues.
Occam was my barber, Rabelais my priest. I filibustered Cicero, finagled Machiavelli, fancied Scheherezade…users, all of them. Crackheads, like me.
In the beginning, my father said. “Hear that ! That humming in the telephone wires, that’s all the people in the world, talking. Listen !” Another word for love.
Now those fricatives and plosives fill my head, endings and the cut and fit of clauses, all the smack and lilt, familiar. At times I almost catch the gist, like voices through a wall.
They are not to be measured in fathoms of oolite looted by raindrops, the slumping of lias to slopes of repose, the shift of meanders down-river,
but in faces forgotten and pledges still owing, betrayals and night sweats, bad choices, the jostling of birthdays.
They’re measured in cycles repeated till broken, in harvest and fallow, nettles and crop marks, fill-dyke and parchment, the shackles of birthrights, “and Son” on the van,
where anything else means crossing the ridgeline while heads shake and beds murmur late in the night and you’re still on a down-slope with rivers that don’t taste of home.
They’re measured in how far you’ve come from your earthing, in how much it hurts you to know.
As the monk, Echo, sounding his responses in the choir, requires no answer, always follows on, there are two worlds, psalm and antiphon, and you are bound to one.
As the two ends of a bridge. Cross it and the river flips polarity. Specks of iron in your brain, fixed now, make one bank feel like home, the other not, and yet, you cross. There must be extraordinary things.
You’ve crossed and seen them all. This far downstream, the bridges cease. There will be no more wonders. It’s years now since you learned that it must end. Your doppelgänger showed you, first as your Dad, dead and the plums half-picked, later your Mum, mid-breath in alabaster.
Nowadays, he plays the Scouser, dry as bones, McGough on downers, Larkin doing Ringo Starr. He hums Gerry and the Pacemakers, “Ferry, ‘cross the Mersey…”, loiters in the chancel, while you chant antiphons, wanting more than silence, after.
Echoes, at least.
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