Thursday, August 01, 2013

The trees are in their winter beauty (or substation blues & reds)

The woodland paths are anything but dry; we've not seen the sun, on this side of The Mountain, for at least a week. But today the sun is blazing: 26 degrees centigrade, a pleasure.

Not that I'll ever have a problem with the wide-flat squalls of rain lashing the roof, slating the house's lead paned windows in irregular batches.

It evokes life-passion within me - I am more alive in those moments, when my skin crawls with both my aliveness and deathness: I am so alive that my death hums-breathes-roars-and-curtsies through my veins and arteries like the energy surging through the cables from a substation.

I attempt to choose my exit from the house carefully, as if by squinting heavenwards I can read the downpour gaps - mind the gap! - in the tumultuous-ominous elephantine cloud banks that rage over-against-upwards the mountain.

It's in those ill-predicted gaps that I squirrel through the wet tar streets voyeuring through modern double glazed windows - and ancienter windows too, glass rheumy with history-age and the withered-white families that have ghosted these dank passages and living [s]places - looking for life and curiosity.

Everything is new to me: these bare European trees of the Cape, the different looking people that every then and now catch me staring, analysing, wondering; I quickly look away - I'm innocent my game proclaims! The birds, the different-many angles and peaks of The Mountain, the luminous tailed squirrels that leap springbok like from there to here and back again, then zig-zag zig-zap up a tree, across,  and then back down again

I leave the peace of the house, my room in the roof with a view, for the cluttered steam-windowed coffee shops and bistros, where I sweat blood to put down my words. And to walk with my ever faithfull Maker through-and-across-and-over the pages... in-and-then-out-again of my heart of darkness.

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