(To whom, all those, with which I share these streets; I root for you.)
Published in ISSUE XI: COMMON GROUND.
7.09.23
From the window, third floor, Newburn Street, 11:17;
I think I’d like to be a street sweeper this time of year. Erasing the fall of those first, untenable leaves. Sweeping dry sweeps in sunlight that pours like hot treacle. The trees, still full, offering shaded protection. I watch a young sweeper sweep and push and sweep and push along the pavement. He wears fluorescent orange. His shoulders sing out, dappled in slits of the shade, the treacle scorching the canopy.
Over the fence, a large mouse / small rat shelters in the shadows of fauna around the side of a neighbouring estate; the garden of a woman who smokes in a leather upholstered chair by her back door. The leather is the same colour as the brickwork, almost camouflaged, a surface even and opaque like beeswax. She’s there so often she could be stuck to it, permanently dressing-gowned, hair box-dye brown or black or burgundy and fixed in a halo of static, with nothing to do but smoke and watch the garden bubble over. When she’s not in position I feel, dully, her absence, hold a belief that something is off-kilter, the tracks of our lives failing to intersect being at the hand of something out-of-service.
Sat there, she looks absently upon the weeds, positioned on a concrete platform from which steps lead to the unruly garden. Shaded by the balcony above, the area acts as an open enclosure; a black railing guards her from the shallow drop, a barrier between her home and the city’s nature, that morphs into a bannister running parallel above the steps. So still does she smoke, taking long drags contorted like a Greek statue. Her movements in-between — drawing the cigarette up to her mouth, bending over a doughy middle to flick the end into an ashtray — happen silently and weightlessly. She lives with her son who I saw last night. He stood in a similarly absent way as his mother smokes, from this same vantage point, waiting for the Scottie-dog to crap. She smokes and sips a glass of juice, the sweeper sweeps.
At the corner that opens onto Vauxhall Street, a rubbish van swings round and stops. The sweeper and the van-men talk familiarly until the van moves off. The sweeper sweeps.
A postman passes by, keys jangling. An invisible thread tethers a helicopter with two sets of propellers to his belt — a rumbling balloon. They circle the block in tandem, until a hammer drill takes over the tremolo. The air is metallic, with sunlight, with noise.
Cigarette, smoked. The street, swept. With his brush we are transported backwards, time is erased in the cycle, and it is tomorrow and earlier today simultaneously. Only the shade and the sunlight confirms linearity; the shadow of chimneys from my replica estate drag their way down the mirror image I look upon with the day, and the leaves fall again, in lilting surrender; today is tomorrow / tomorrow is today.
People pass, engines circle synced to the pulse of the birds calling. Cats yawn, a television groans, leaves fall, a butterfly flits back and forth, a car alarm jolts. The climax of a plane weaves itself in reverberations between our chimneys, invisibly. The butterfly bobs, the leaves fall, the wind rolls them gently along Newburn Street, softly jangling a sound the same as pattering keys.
The street sweeper, the time traveller; luminous with the power to reset, to push forward.
12:08;
A man walks by who I’ve crossed paths with a few times on Kennington Lane. He has a rake of a body, the body of a tulip, tall and drooping, he walks leading with slender hips, his hair side parted and stuck to sunken cheeks. With one hand always checking that it’s still in place as we pass each other. A plastic bag curtly swings from the other. He gives the impression of a harmless but nevertheless overgrown weed. Shirt and trousers, whatever the weather. I root for him.
13:12;
The moon emerges, swimming in blue, her lower half submerged, she is exposed sunning her left cheek, a distant oyster pearl. Beyond our roofs, a regular string of wheels clatter against the train tracks and wash towards her edges in a circling tide.
~
Later that evening; sitting in the living room with J.
CUNT____ CUNT ___
bursts forth from the street below, rasping like a demon, spinning upwards, bouncing against the brickwork.
I stick my head out of the window, look down to the pavement, a grey river with banks of double yellow lines. Walking past, fists clenched, plastic bag gripped in one hand, is the wandering weed-man. Revealing to me, unknowingly, his hot coil of suffering; at the mercy of an impulse beyond control or free will. Then echoes our resounding silence, a balm of acceptance and indifference.
To whom, all those, with which I share these streets; I root for you.
Comments