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It’s their tenacity that draws me in— all that nimble bloody-mindedness. Four shell-backs at my window, a miniature crocheting bee, the workers ambitious as Daedalus, not a hint of arthritis or trigger-finger as they cast their lines. They have a plan and they stick to it: dream homes, castles in Spain, folies de grandeur to rival Ludwig’s. No need for safety nets or crampons: watch them hang by a thread, free- fall in slow-motion through thin air, straddling the void with a sequence of rope-tricks that leave Tarzan standing.
How easy it looks, taking the world on trust! Trust them to shake a leg at rose-bushes and tornadoes, to start from scratch, again and again and again. Hasn’t anyone told them that even the most complicated embroideries get lost in the post? That the window-cleaners will be calling tomorrow? That tout le malheur des hommes vient de l’espérance?
I’d like an airport farewell: a crowded concourse, the clash and glide of trolleys loaded with bags;
a lovers’ embrace in a spin through revolving doors, nothing left but ellipsis.
So much heartbreak in the tannoyed voices rattling off departures from the gates.
You could be kind, could send me off with a burger and a fizzy drink, sucky sweets for my ears, a bouquet of magazines.
Let me check my heart in before you wave in case there’s a knife I’ve forgotten to declare.
Bad blood between us: he blames me for his agony, grows costive, rages and curses until his bladder convulses above his pubic bones like the sun
swelling on the horizon. When I squeeze down the narrowness of his passages, he is mightily inflamed by needle-cramps and his piss-water
flushes crimson. He is so crazed with pain that he would let his fundament be bled by thirsty leeches or submit my crystals to the Doctor’s
knife. God help him, he stays his stomach with butter and radishes, anchovies, venison-pasty, pickled oysters, lobsters and fresh peas, as if feasting
might reconcile us, or a pottle of Old Canary wine. I am his treasure, his hazelnutt, his white stone, and yet he sees not how I mark him out from other
men. I humour him because he is the ship I sail in, tho’ these last weeks we wrestle so together I cannot tell which one will have the victory.
*
So I am cutt, and have been mercifully pulled to dry land from the rough seas, a shipwrecked sailor hoisted on the spar of a Chirurgion’s
probe. No more flood-fed wallowing, no more steering through rapids or floating like a dead man on the drink. I have found my place in history—
Sam Pepys’s stone, as big as a tennis-ball, a very great stone. He has bespoke a case to keep me in for twenty-five shillings so that whenever
his friends are afflicted by the same condition he may bring me to their beds. My birth-day in March he celebrates with a merry dinner
and much praising of the Lord. I do not often miss the whorls and spirals of my watery home, the golden light, the unpredictable showers.
She’s dressed for it, black all over, enough sheer leg to kick him down to hell and back.
The music’s turned down low, Springsteen or Schubert—hard to tell, with the champagne
flowing like Lethe. An awkward silence, then someone launches into a pithy
anecdote about his schooldays, raises a laugh, dries up between the canapés.
On the tip of her tongue the poem she never wrote, in all those years never enough time
to get it right. A shame— he would have liked the way it ended, her lame
pairing of shitty with eternity.
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