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I Just now everything is still and white, snow, or the light on snow. If hills could breathe they would breathe like this: heavily, laboured, full of rocks and earth. In this country we would all be lost, the creases and folds are no whiter than your arms; there are no landmarks south of the thin line of your lashes, dark as coal seams, still as an airless day. Only this breath moves misting the oxygen mask, wrenching apart mountains.
III
Blood is the darkest colour, night blackens it but by day it glowers: the unspeakable eyes that loom in caverns, the dull glow of lanterns carried by hobgoblins, tarnished rubies, pebbles drying as the sea ebbs.
This is a dark river that flows into secret places. Under the ice everything is burning.
Our horse won the Avondale Cup one year, from behind, coming up on the outside.
All winter the record played, the commentator's excitement lifted us high each time.
Even my sister learnt to place the needle carefully to hit just the right spot. They were off.
Uncle Jack drank whiskey in the bathroom before breakfast. It was the cold. Getting up at six to work the horses.
Fog made everything invisible until you got up close. The rails around the horse paddocks would suddenly appear, dark and solid; then disappear.
The horses were led out tossing their heads like Pegasus. Even gelded they stropped about, oat fed, skipping sideways when the rails did their looming trick.
The jockeys were my height but iron hard. They moved like cats, even their eyes thinned.
I sat on rails watching them thunder in and out of fog, shadows wreathed in steam, eyes rolled on victory,
clutching the white horses off the whiskey bottle so hard the marks stayed on my palms forever.
Pain kept you awake, afterwards you wondered if by some freak of wind you’d heard.
The dogs killed silently or water did, the weight of wool pulling them under. Those that lived long enough for you to kill lay deep in culverts Their flanks ribboned.
I stopped the words that welled like blood in your throat, could not bear spoken this that lay upon our tongues.
Sacking holds the sheep, skinned and gutted, heads and feet gone. The waste of everything lies between us.
Bending the carcass you chop where tendons bind bone to bone. The sheep dismembers neatly.
Finished, you wipe your hands on the apron. The fat gleams, blood makes sequins on it.
People die every day. The boy on the poster at yesterday’s march - his uncle was it? or just a stranger, carrying his death above us. I was a pall bearer for a moment, I and those around who glanced up. ‘My nephew,’ it said, ‘killed by US imperialism.’ He wasn’t the first, people are disappearing one after another —my father’s football team for example. All gone, he says.
I remember you standing in the black of a pub garden, the thin tip of your cigarette shining. I’d said ‘Go out, I can’t breathe.’ My father blowing smoke out the car window, tapping ash into the wind. The smell of the match, that quick flare of memory. I’d wanted a moment alone. ‘It’s fine,’ you said in your rough voice, ‘I’m fine.’
You anticipate me now, say ‘I know there’s nothing to say’ and there isn’t. We laugh. What did we laugh about? I can’t remember. It seems absurd, the planes are still flying their ridiculous missions - sometimes they fly so low I swear they know I’m here, cocking a snook at my useless cursing. The birds shake themselves down.
This afternoon, like Whitman, I chopped wood or rather (because I want to be honest) cut with a long bow saw, one foot up on a chair, steadying branches broken from an oak. Last winter’s storm. It makes me feel virtuous, virtuous and connected. Part of the day as the leaves on the beech are part of it, and the birds, huddled, out of reach.
I know this back woods libertarianism is romantic and that the world continues on as shittily as ever despite my storing carbons and dreaming of disconnecting from the grid - but it feels right to use my arms and afterwards to walk out across fields where next year’s over production of wheat is pushing through and the beet mountain is growing on its concrete slab.
There are three men working on the church, up on ladders painting the gutters and down pipes. They let me in to the normally locked tower where the white washed banner closet is full of mops and brooms. I stand in the middle so the four foot Saxon walls surround me and it know it’s crazy but I feel part of time - still temporal but so long it doesn’t matter.
I can cope with a thousand years, it’s this absurd shortening of breath, the cutting off of life for no reason - a boy falling with a milk bottle in his hand, a shadow on an X-ray, these planes with their howl of death that reach across into unimagined lives - this boy who is as we will be. People die every day. Don’t.
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