What it is: armies of rice grasses filing up, down and sideways, lay floating reflections – thriving where others drown, marching where you never out peddle them. And one day, when the sun – blurred by autumn, hung blotted-yellow by mist – a fox made of the same sun, looked back at a never before seen you.
What it is: the face of night – vast – its dimensions rising or falling from oblivion; the flames’ fingers snapping wood, liberating spermatazoan flecks, impregnating the darkness with a silence so heavy it is cold.
What it is: the effect of sound to painlessly break the body, take it to the ground in contortion, hold it suspended by that arrangement of chords tied to the DJs next song.
What it is: the right angle and reaching and reaching until you fall, but the split second of skull crushing pain is circumvented by opened eyes.
What it is: the crisp faces of new places, what stands behind the facade. It is hope and discovery of things being the same…of them being different, of nurturing a feeling and of starving it lifeless.
What it is: a small shovel and dirt? Gardening has joined the moments of abandon…but how?
Gardening
What it is: the breath of day escaping the crack of its shell as light; the congregation, arms upstreched for its blessing, their mounds flooded through prisms refracting green.
It’s a catalogue of personalities. The string and bora beans stumbling about, drunkened by the wind, but doing fine with the least amount of fuss. The cherry tomatoes, stingy with their fruits at the onset, double in height when given choices and hang camouflaged ornate lamp shades.
These shrubs are proud and disinterested in their neighbours. Their dedication to producing one wooden okra every three days, must be thwarted. The lettuce adds frills to its skirt, straightening then opening into a Christmas tree, its star, an inflorescence of yellow feathers; basil bunch up and rush to call the bees; the cucumber vines crawl past my noticing and hold on where I would rather they did not; herbs use their perfumes as a deterrent, but are dismembered with scissors and added to heated oils.
Slugs will eat holes in the fabric of a perfect leaf I would rather, then, remove than look at. Too much water will drown the roots causing leaves to yellow. They will also fade from living with: too little water, too much food, too little food and ruptured friendships.
The foliage of the scotch bonnet peppers has become a mottled brown and may fall off when touched. “How am I to help you keep yourself alive?” I say and find that, in such contemplations, freedom is also to be found.
What it is: oftentimes also it is not.
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