Inchings and Belongings: After Paul Strand

1.

The building’s torn down – an irreducible light, a blow to the knee you received there, flights of literature in stacked paperbacks. We saw books gather our balcony, glancing from slow pages to that grimy world. We shook traffic noise from ears. So much to keep that we couldn’t possess, silos of being and memory suddenly at odds. When a blue-inked notice arrived we stood in outrage, debating what to do – we would not have our lives resumed. But we’d no rights in the matter and months absorbed us in shifting away. On the day of demolition Thomas Crimmins Contracting moved equipment in. Walls fell on our doings; light flooded damp ground. I saw a paper bird that looked like one you’d made last Christmas, among rubble. You’d already walked into the alleyway where the baker had been, riddling our mornings with yeasty smells. “No,” you said. We left dust to permeate that air and gathered the spectral into our seeing. We found no further words in the broken morning.

2.

Every morning light gathered us in avenues; each evening we swam in yellowed glass. Summer pressed us down like someone fixing a stamp. Regularly we bathed in the dirty sea near the harbour mouth. We knew love like twitchings of light at the end of bed frames. We gathered being like those fisherman netting fat, glistening prawns. The city steamed and glowed, summer stretching out like a body on a bed. In the morning we saw ourselves as a photographer might see us. On evenings we were pale fish swimming and turning.

3.

Roots spilled on dark sand like wild calligraphies. We climbed, slid back, clambered again, grasped the long tendrils. You held on to my ankle and hauled yourself up my leg. Our backs held down sand even as wind gathered it. We scrabbled forwards and upwards, finally within reach of high ground. A pathway and cottage, a broken window allowing us in. Two stones on a bench and a smashed porcelain statue. On the cottage’s other side, a cliff face and cleft sandstone. A painted gathering of sheep. We stood above fluctuations among fingers of sun and irascible air.

Paul Hetherington