grim shore
260322 | postcard from a blue-sheened grackle
I was thirty-five when I met the lion in the woods. I’m even older now, more than halfway through the course of wooded life. Waves explode on the beach, the wind throws sand in our face. It’s a world of insult and furies. Today is for reading books. “Then the earth of that grim shore began to shake.” The poet promises we’ll meet the Hound of Heaven; he speaks of her with reverence. She’s on her way, for sure. A superior potato chip flavour is ‘cheese.’ I relish the way it becomes a paste and clings to the recesses of my molars, savour the ongoing task of excavating bolus with the tongue. “All light is mute, with a bellowing like the ocean / Turbulent in a storm of warring winds.” I oughtta drink more water, that effort, too, is endless like wind, like waves. Carlos our driver chooses the fire-flavoured takis, not ‘cheese.’ When passing other drivers on the narrow road to Chiquilà he lifts one hand from the wheel and gestures, the thumb tucked, the pinky and index raised: the devil. Grackles strut on the sand and bathe in the pool and alight in the palms above and sing and scream. A grackle does not forget water. The mango seller’s tiny child sneaks away from the mango cart. The sun loungers watch him as, suddenly, nonchalantly, he pulls down his little pants and defecates generously in the sand. The loungers look away. A hotel employee notifies the mango seller who finishes slicing a mango into a flower for a lounger then approaches the pile and, with a hand inside a little green plastic bag, collects his child’s stool and carries it away. The ocean is yellow. The grackles’ have a blue sheen. At night lightning storms flash across the gulf, hot and silent, a distant menace. Next morning I drink coffee and watch the men in jeans and grey shirts rake the sand on the beach. The rakes are wide and orange and the men drag them across the sand repeatedly inward toward their bodies, standing always in a patch of yet-unraked sand. It’s an endless effort. But I could watch them rake forever, too. The raked sand is churned like the yellow sea and fresh-looking and clean because the act of raking has removed palm fronds, aluminum cans, shit. The debris is pulled into line in the sand like a tideline or a national border, and later a man with a wide hat and smart black back-brace arrives with a wheel barrow and collects the foreign stuff into a single large pile and carries it away somewhere where the tourists won’t see it. That is what you pay for as a guest, for others silently to hide the things that repulse or offend. I mourn stepping on virgin sand but also I enjoy it very much. I consider asking one of the men to have a go at the rake but I fear this would only disturb and I do not want to repulse or offend. I am on holiday, I imagine myself saying, and would like please to be carted off in a wheelbarrow and placed somewhere quiet. In this scenario I tip the man more generously than I’m used to. Wars are an atrocity and a distraction. They bomb schools and call it freedom. The sun has appeared and the mourning doves sound desperate. I am lost when hungry. Their song is urgent: one-twooo-five. “The caw their lamentations in the eerie trees.” Today the sycophants circle maralago. Tomorrow, malebranche. The sun burns everything. There was wind in the palms and dogs on the strand and the water was not yellow now but teal. Earth’s a blue marble in black empty space. There are wars waged in our imagination. The miracle of flight is tempered somewhat by the volume of loungers who partake in it. Maybe you can’t buy a miracle, maybe a miracle ought to be rare. The day before the day we were to leave, a couple drags their bags across the sand to check out at the front desk, and it makes the impression of witnessing others die before you, knowing — though not fully trusting — that tomorrow it will be you dragging your bags across the sand. Jenny Erpenbeck: “we are guests time and again, as if for a trial run: in other people’s apartments, summer houses, hotels. […] At some point, when the time is up, a woman may come, or a man, or an owner, or a landlord, and tell us to leave.” In grey Toronto a sparrow lies black and wet in the wet black leaves. We wipe down our suitcases with disinfectant wipes and fall asleep.
Beautiful