Not Him

The first thing to go is his scent. I know it was clean, soapy. Green soap towel-dried sun cream three showers a day clean. And metallic. Boxes of screws. Hessian bags of feed, seed. Creosote fence posts. And sweet: balsamic, pomegranate, pineapple. Eyes closed, I could pick him out of a police lineup of all my ex-lovers, but I can’t actually remember it.

Childless Gepetto longed for a son, so he carved one. Pine, nails, glue, chisel, hammer, saw, paint, hinges, screws…what rough magic transfigures scrap into a real live boy? I set a table: seashells, a woolen sweater, a sod of turf, whitebait, a worn leather belt, wild mushrooms, a ramekin of olive oil, a cork, cherry tomatoes on the vine, honeysuckle, bicycle grease. Blindfolded, I forage, layer, discard. Not him. Not him. Not him.

Moho

During the design process for a series of sculptural tables (think chain saw plunging into a length of silky smooth, oiled walnut), I came across a glossary of geologic terms.  What to call a piece whose hand-planed surface is a broken crust, fissured, a dip-slip fault fragmented by centrifugal forces? Techtonic table? Too cutesy.

Geosyncline, glacial striation, granitization - the G’s have weight, consequence, gravitas. The D’s get me thinking about the brutal majesty of nature: debris avalanche, dendritic drainage, diatom ooze, diagenesis! F-ing hell, it’s a wonder our creamy bodies managed to survive at all between falling rocks, folds, flumes, fault block mountains, friction breccia. The E-words are almost encouraging: epoch (longer than an age but shorter than a period), eon, era (longer than a period but shorter than an eon)… yet I, almost half a century old, a mote, a fleck, a particulate, engage with the effects of earthflow, ebb tides, ephemeral streams and evapotranspiration, parrying with a tube of Strivectin. An aged land mass just sitting there crumbling is elegantly described as angular unconformity in repose, but when we get old, we’re sediment.

A differentiated planet like ours ages gracefully: a metal-rich core, surrounded by a rocky mantle, discreetly cloaked in a pashmina of low-density minerals. We wrinkle, scar, pit, shrivel, in an accelerating decline no serum, superfood or surgery can counter. Decay is not a good look on flesh and blood, while Disintegration is the Earth’s new black! Give me an Ice Age, I’ll give you fjords, lakes, great glacial valleys, Bjork! Too much sun, too little factor 50 and I’m a dream deferred (literary reference, see Harlem by Langston Hughes). Erosion, in the geological sense, feels almost tender: a wearing away of matter by gravity, wind, water and ice. Rock of Ages, hear my plea! Be kind to my alluvial fan. Help me embrace my continental shelf as my convergent boundaries, well, converge. And should I be lucky enough to sail through my Quaternary period with negligible subsidence, don’t hate me for my isostasy. Blame it on my Mohorovicic Discontinuity – yeah, blame it on my Moho.

The Back Yard (after William Carlos Williams)

so much depends
upon

a broken
kiddie pool

caved in,
puddled blue

beaten senseless
by our dad.

This Is Just To Say (after William Carlos Williams)

I bit your arse
as you stood
naked at the sink

wiping the mirror
with a yellow sponge
and Cif

Forgive me
your butt was too tempting
your mind elsewhere
as you cleaned