In the forest at Tibradden, where we spent all our time that rare, real summer of 1995, we dreamed your dream of escape. If you don’t leave the place you grow up, everything becomes a monument, you said on the bus out one day. Imagine seeing the same stuff every day, all your life. That didn’t sound like a bad thing to me then. I thought nothing of the leaden outpost from which we’d sprung, only of you, and this abundant acreage in which, undisturbed, we improvised verdant bedrooms, studies, attics and gardens. Now you live in Bangkok. You live in colour; in greens, mainly, I suspect. I have stayed behind. I have chosen monuments.
I come here only in September, when the leaves themselves become sunshine, even on grey days, to grey lives. Now a “wooded area”, our forest has shrunk. We never carved our names on the oaks or beech. To do so would have seemed cruel, for we felt them as alive as our own bodies. Like parent and newborn, we didn’t know where they ended and we began. We branded our bodies against their bare bark. Each tree, a third party to our union, a gentle conspirator, both host and guest.
Like all things overly known, I have contempt for this town, particularly in summer. Its sewer scented streets on weekend mornings, dappled with hopeful travellers from more optimistic places, framing gentle fictions in their camera lenses. But then, another September, and with it, a quietness.
I take to the wood and the earth itself, with every radiant, death-defying fallen leaf, yields forth all it retains of you. You could have been my perpetual harvest, but I could not leave. Though in September, your light in each remaining leaf, I gather you still.
---
First published in the Fish Anthology (2016).
No comments:
Post a Comment