Friday 8 March 2013

Plexus


Make no mistake I keep my enemies close to me, always carry a mirror with me so I can see their reflection. See the reflection of the greatest warrior clothed as I am clothed, with intimations as mine. Speak mimic. This is the constant rise and fall, this is the fall out of consequence. My mouth is a gun, I have no inclination for Russian roulette, lest I forget the long road we have travelled from there to here. Hear the declaration of insolence written on the body. Written under the star kissed skies.

We wake to drums in the distance, calling workers to their labour, wives away from husbands and children from the embrace of family. There are bricks to be made in the wilderness. Men to their knees in water digging clay with spades, the mechanics of industry do not reach this far. Plumes of smoke rise up from the kilns, fired constantly for years. Home fires may have cooled, to damp ash, shovelled by infants whose mothers stack damp kindling wet with tears. There is a pretty violet bruise painted under her left eye. My finger touches the swelling. There is too much noise, the grating, hammering violence against the earth. Kiln pond is stained by the wealth of London. We built her here before she rose in stacks, chimneys and towers.

The cold seeps into you, gentle at first, so not to rouse suspicion. Clings to the internal rafters of your being spinning intricate webs of hoarfrost. The cellular design of my person is not inclined to withstand your violence, I have no knowledge of who built me or how. I have not long known the mechanics of biology. Did you speak my name across the meadows before I walked to where you laid. Pine cones lay as litter, my feet have learnt to mould around their shape. I tried eating them but found their bitterness to similar to the love my Mother fed me. We are all starved of something, the trick is to know what you are missing and where to forage to find your own sense of sustenance.

I suspect it is an unhappy machine that carves the land with its broken iron teeth. Or an unhappy woman that carves the flesh from her skin with the paring knife while peeling potatoes. Our reality, is diluted as it runs from us into dirty water full of peelings. There is only so much we can carve ourselves before we hit bone. Then we are faced with the truth white and solid, knitted with calcium, connective tissue that feeds the source from the source. We are cannibalistic in our transfiguration. My father picks his teeth the rib of a rabbit whose neck he broke to feed us as the ground cursed the sky. Cloudless the unsympathetic midwinter came heavy and lay for months across the fields. Birds descend frozen from beech trees long stripped of their leave.

My fingers wrapped in plastics bags for the warmth of sweat laid them out one by one upon the pyre of imagination. Often I have burnt myself with its delirium. Their wings I unpinned from the ground, staked with pine needles my brother had stabbed through their mechanism of locomotion. How can they fly when welded to the loam. Even in death his violence could not retreat to allow grief to swell and spirits to find their own destination. Each head I kissed, damp lips fusing to feathers. I had so little language I could not muster a prayer and my faith had long departed with the warmth of summer. Some had lost legs upon falling, I fashioned new limbs from twigs, sized to proportions.

They cannot walk and I cannot fly. Why is remembering always washed in the blue tone of winter, when our internal axis tilts furthest from the conviviality of the sun.

Copyright:Samantha Ledger 2013

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