The lack of luster is now noticeable, the feeling of nobler old no longer the feeling. The place tastes of mold, the chairs old and crackly. Curtains that once enchanted her – velvet in deep red, luscious, when the pollen and the dogs were in shedding season, the many folds now just drape limply. The curtains no longer lead, easy dust gatherers, hard to mend. She no longer has a wish to make up for velvety burgundy light catching curtains in a rich northern european house in africa. What Ana now has is hers and hers alone. On the verge of precipice – the overlook where the cottage stands solid and the ocean plays a game of erosion with the beach, down where there is rock and sand. Hardly any vegetation she knows and none of the natives from childhood.
From the closed window to the north, if she tried, she could barely hear the ocean, that steady old ocean child. The south brings the storms, unusual and strong. The south brings the other side of the bay, steel halyards bobbing against wood, the south brings the sails, the travels and the family ties.
A fireplace, dim shards of light focused here and there and everywhere, books and papers. She never quite knows though, where the papers come from, what is their provenance? What is their ecological balance? What is it in their presence that helps her be and makes her steadier? What is it that makes her surround herself with so much cellulose – why then, this keen connection to the fallen trees?
In her lifetime, she knew of tribes that substituted for the Y chromosome but for paper and for trees? Beyond the books, the documented written evidence, and her pens with very fine points, beyond the future writings, all she has is a computer screen and she convinced herself a long time ago that electricity would run out and that the screen would also run out. There are no printers here. The batteries, never having been solar, would also run out. It is a necessary illusion in her lonesomeness. The time when she could finally compost the papers, after the death of the screen, the time when she would be free. Then comes the rain and the rain, like always, follows the winds.
No pity patter this time – nor just the wishing rain at the end of day. Not a human sound, this steady pounding.
This rain is like the rain of deluge – the end of the world rain. As noisy as the tin roof rain, no tin roof this time, no family to tie her to the rain, this drowning of lullabies. She catches a silver thread of palm frond in the water flow - memory still, the trickster to her ties awake. Then, this time and for the first time she watches the musical noise in the rain.
To the north, in the ocean, the sun sets a landscape of slivery, dark green tingly, chimy, satie bell like charcoal and grey. Bright against the wind rain light of sun, blinding a fool, if you dared to look at it, close enough.
“Do not ever look at an eclipse of the sun for too long or you will go blind.” “Do not ever stand outside in a storm” “Do not ever swim in the rain” Will death make me blind? Will the stare on an owl make me blind? How many rituals can systematically make me blind? I do not think of that often. Glossing over silly romantic notions that my depression will lift, like a cloud. That all will be better tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep. That all will work out, like in the gyms, in muscled tone. As expected, all will remain the same, all limbs will become slim, all slim limbs will fatten up, all eye sights will improve, once I learn to be blind. She wobbles toward the south. And there, by the window, she catches the edge of a color. If she leans out, stretches her neck a bit, but that hurts… So, she steps outside, careful of her step, and there a deep colored rainbow, the deepest she had ever seen,
As if the colors of the place could no longer contain themselves inside, with so much humming light, that they made a shadow, and doubles and triples in their colors!
Not just a day, nor a night, a life, nor a rain and a light. In the colors of all brush strokes, a lick, a time, a rime, a death, a place and a promise, a perfect rainbow of all colors deeply imagined! etched on to the skies safe codes unlocked, protections unprotected, bodies opened, skins meshed, helix ageing alone revealed in this rainbow of many colors.
and while still breathing, while still killing the blues, we continue to catch one and the other at the end of many occasional rainbows...
Wow! Applause from the audience!