Squatting at the fire, framed by the majesty of the high
Mongolian hills, a crone. Bent back, grey strands straddling her shoulders, the
softest down on her aging cheeks, she works. She flicks ochre threads between
her fingers, angled with arthritis, but sprightly as flitting larks.
Distant shrieks of play pierce the wide silence of her work.
Without lifting her head, dirty children fill her mind’s eye, squealing and
cackling as they chase and catch and chase. A rumble of contentment and love rolls
from her chest as she weaves.
A world away, an infant’s lungs are lifted with hospital air
as he sucks in the first of a lifetime of breaths. Gory with birth, strands of filigree
hair plastered to his scalp, he screams and writhes, finding his body with pure
consciousness, no conscious awareness at all. He searches for the breast,
already suckling at the air. There is no heartbeat in the warm chest he lies
across, and he’s lifted from it into the cold and away to an angular womb with
warmth and stability but no softness. He breathes. He sleeps. His small heart
keeps the beat.
Waves thunder onto stones below Pacific cliffs. Pelicans
ride the air. Kelp dances in the flow and otters weave and play, making light
of the force of the ocean that holds them. Stones and shells and sand combine
to make the ground. Crawling things run on and through it, making it rich with
life. High above the beach, hummingbirds hide in passion vines, sucking sweet
nectar from the flowers’ hidden bellies. Dreams evaporate with the thinning
morning fog, called away by the sun.
Isabelle stands over her mother’s sleeping form. Passed out
on the couch, angry pock-marks screaming from the crooks of her elbows, the
lines of her legs inside the knee, the swollen skinny ankles. Her breath, acrid
and shallow, slips in and out between her parted lips. Isabelle strokes her
mother’s hair, plants a drop of innocence on the clammy forehead in a kiss and
covers her with the parka on the floor at her feet. She pulls a chair from the
kitchen table, clambers up onto the counter and reaches her treasure, a sealed
pack of Jacob’s crackers on the top cupboard shelf.
At one tip of the island, a lighthouse on a tongue of sand
sticking out into the sea. At the other, the mockery of a mountain, craggy like
its older brothers on the mainland, heathered and steep, peeling into fields
and woods and marsh. A taster of the Welsh landscape concentrated here,
cordoned by currents and weather fronts that only the canniest seafarers can
cross. Shearwaters hide in the mountain’s sides, calling from their caves for
their mates to bring food for their young. Collared doves coo. Chuffs cough
their ungainly song at each other from the air. Sheep lift their heads. The
tang of peat and salt thicken the air.
Long and lithe, straight-backed, eyes sparkling behind lace,
Isabelle takes her partner’s hand and speaks back the words offered to her by
the priest. As he honours her with the same ritual dance, the softly spoken
words, he smiles at her with his whole body. She caresses their baby’s head as
their final vows are spoken. For herself, she makes another, silent, promise to
her child. “Never will you look into my eyes and find nothing. Never will you
have to be my mother: I am yours. Never will fear rock you to sleep. That’s our
job.”. And she blesses the memory of her mother for making her, and leaving her,
to live.
Water from high, high above pounds the ancient rocks below,
bursting up to taste the air, then drop back below the surface. The pool
stretches out and calms, rippled by swimmers who chatter at the water’s icy
welcome. Oak trees dressed in moss line the pool, where butterflies settle and
grey wagtails make their dance. The mountain breathes and every atom breathes
with her.
Yannis, strong and wild, cold at the mountain’s lip, roars
as he leaps over the edge. Black curls plastered to his temples with the force
of his fall, his arms outstretched like Christ, his spirit soaring. He screams,
cradled in the loud silence of the rushing air. He feels his life at its most
living, at its most close to death.
A practiced hand tugs at the release, his parachute rips
open and with a lurch, trips his fall from plummet to lilting, sickening drift.
He feels the blood flooding through his veins, his heart beating out the
pattern of his life. He opens his fingers wide to touch the air, and still he
falls. And just in time, he tips his body back, adjusts the cord and steps onto
the ground with a curstey’s lightness. Loving the earth as he loves its
absence, he gathers up his chute and waits for Matthias to jump, not far
behind.
As the timeless sun sets behind the mountain and the
children end their play, a crone sits crouched over her cloth, lifeless and
complete. The fire burns gently, embers and little, licking flames. The village
gathers, dirty-faced children, strong bodied adults, old frail elders and a keening,
weeping son, holding his mother with the love of his whole lifetime. Women take
her from him, remove the woven mat from her hands and place it on her chest.
The dead woman seems to smile as they lay her flat. You’d say her heart still
beat and her eyes still sparkled, or is it just the lustre of the moon come out
to bless her on her way.
A bat lifts blindly to the sky. The stars shine. The wind
rises, making the branches sing.
“Sometimes life’s
energy, whether in nature or another person, stops us in our tracks.”
Neil Douglas-Klotz
