Language

Sol calls it the ‘dream language’; half close your eyes and you will catch something, seem to understand a character in the instant of drawing breath. The movement of rice stems as a woman parts them. A man in a doorway, his shoulders and legs cutting light.

Sol’s voice born from a place I have never seen. I make him say ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’ over and over, just so I can hear the movement of a wave; the crest, the trough, the water rising again.

Holding Japanese words in his mouth he possesses them for a second. So that the woman picking rice straightens and wipes her brow with a blue cloth. Somewhere in Ireland she walks down a narrow lane where a boy with pale freckled skin is hanging out the washing.

– 116 –

A vein pumping, a heartbeat

The pure physicality of an action where the body has the power to cup the mind gently and darkly as if the body were two hands. The fingers curled like wings.

In Earth a young Russian man dies and his lover throws her body against the walls of the house, trying to lose the thought in the expanse of herself. The mind darts below the surface of the skin, spreading distress. A small shrewish thing it can be caught in the violence of a bruise, momentarily stilled.

Sol says he is at the Billy Graham rally for ‘social anthropology’. He likes to piece together events, watch people’s reactions. Concentrating this hard, his eyes disappear; incredible activity apparent in his stillness.

People are waving their programmes—wind through a field, hairs on a giant head. Down below on the artificial grass a tiny man stands on a ladder trying to catch something of Billy Graham. Meanwhile I become transfixed by the freckle at the tip of Sol’s nose; it grows under my gaze, I pour my mind into it. So there is my mind idling at the end of Sol’s nose and for a while I have his freckle as silent and dense as a small pebble in my head.

– 117 –

A herbal

Michiyo

In this room the sound of scissor blades opening and closing like cicada wings. Everyone laughing at the noise of the big gaijin. He is making a doll for his daughter and can’t decide which brocade to use. So he eats and talks while the others work. Squeezes thimble-sized jellies into his mouth, smacks his lips over the red beans.

Michiyo thinks he has the skin of a plucked chicken. All afternoon she watches the blood’s movement to the surface, his face reddening the louder he talks. Colour ebbing away again; dye running from a cloth.

Inside, running from throat to belly, Michiyo has the skeleton of a large fish. It is minutely boned with social graces. She can move her body to them, her mouth forms their notes. High on each cheek she has a tiny black freckle. All afternoon the white man waits for them to fall like poppy seeds from rice cakes.

– 119 –

Bran

The edge of day and night. Inside myself weeping, but also on the far bank watching myself, a young boy weep. Between the bullrushes two men talking, one my father.

My whole body green and not supple; a yew bow made too soon so it would spring and perhaps crack if twanged. Wanting no one to touch this new bow. The warning rustle of the sedge grass like the curved horns of the elk, keeping open space around me.

Each of us moves slowly, puts a hand on the stretched skin canoe containing my mother, pushing it out into the river. A speckled brown seedpod passing under the bridge. ‘Bran.’ My name said by my father, the seedpod of me. A vessel stopping me from following her.

At night, lying close to her, my mother’s breath smelt of lavender and milk. Now I smell myself; grease on my fingers and peculiar to me the scent of a freshly torn branch; cool like the air of a very early morning. The dark woman’s blood odour of the river mud. The thick hairy smell of the animal hide worn by my father. All this, the smell of my mother departing.