An ending and a beginning

This is the final post that will appear on this blog. I have disabled comments because it is the most personal to me, and I understand that it may be difficult for readers to find a ‘way into’ it. Nevertheless, I wanted to publish it as it is not only the final post for this blog, but also the last fragment in the whole collection. It is the resolution, the ending, and a beginning.

There is a contact form on the ‘About‘ page in case anyone would like to email me, which is always welcome. I have previously received private emails from readers telling me both what they liked and didn’t like about these fragments: I appreciated every one very much and loved receiving them all.

Thank you from my heart to everyone who has followed my blog. It’s impossible to say what that has meant to me.

*****

Oru

In this utter silence I lay out my sheet of paper like a wound. The words stagger across it like hurried sutures. I leave them to bleed and seep. I lay down my pen.

In ancient China, documents were written on bone or bamboo, and sometimes – expensively – on silk. My sutures are bone deep, they poke like bamboo; I have no silk.

I need to fold myself into myself.

I fold myself into myself.

I fold once, exactly, and two sides are four. I fold twice, exactly, and four sides are eight, corners and edges exact.

Sixteen.

Folding like falling.

The folding of paper. Origami: the ancient Japanese art. ‘Oru’ meaning to fold and ‘Kami’ meaning paper.

I was told as a child that it is impossible to fold a sheet of paper more than seven times. It seemed an easy thing to prove wrong.

Now I hold a wadded bandage. It could staunch or blot, perhaps. But this is a dead end.

Was I dipped slowly into etchant for only this, enwrought with new lines as I now am? Freshly drawn, ley line loud?

I will be filled with ink; and I will hold in my hand not this ugly compress, but a stellated dodecahedron.

Seven more than seven doubled and tripled and interleaved: 20 vertices, 30 edges, 12 faces. One of the five Platonic solids and associated with the fifth element, known in ancient Greece and India as aether, and also the quintessence or universe. Used, said Plato, mysteriously, for arranging the heaven’s constellations.

My sheet of paper like a wound, like sanctuary, like the universe: filling with black ink and interpierced with stars.

*****

 

An embarrassment of grief/Abdication

I have published these two fragments together as the second would not have been possible without the first.

An embarrassment of grief

I know I am only lightly touched; no forensics could detect this. Just an absence: not much to negotiate. No cataclysm doled out here. A little static as afterfeather brushes skin. I am the same in all but everything; I kept my name.

I don’t tell anyone or try to explain; it is too small a thing. And no conversation would be long enough.

But I am not responsible for this quid pro quo, this measuring and weighing: the illogical commerce of grief. Sometimes iridium is traded for feathers. I have no say.

Grief is or is not; there are no gradations, and this is still heavier than lead-heavy. And like a broken umbrella in high wind, impossible to martial: all shreds and skeletal angles and poking elbows.

And me saturated still, even now.

Abdication

I abdicated. From everything and all I had become. To relinquish power is to gain it. And sometimes to be alone.

Now I am queen of the reclamation yard.  I am not sure what I will find or what I have to exchange (guilt being no currency): just small things, I expect, of little value. I potter.

I trip up and trip over.  I stub my toe against the fragile realisation that I am neither too late nor too out of practice. I can uncover and reassemble and gather in. I can use spit and elbow grease and polish; I can discard, or glaze in amber, or be dazzled by something that is pristine still, even now, after all this mothballed time. I can sort over this puzzlement of long-accumulated bric-a-brac and slowly solve and salve.

I abdicated. This little achievement, this small trifle, and suddenly I am beyond the all of everything, and more joyful.

Stratigraphy

I became hungry for memory: a deranged archaeologist losing my foothold on scree. Hours spent looking for a long discarded letter; an afternoon to piece together shards of conversation. Was it that time you asked? Did you know what I meant when I said? I have the overwhelming need to parse you, so I can know.

I drift into sleep deliberately recalling your cheekbone, a blade in the air as you turn to me; the flat planes of your fingernails. When you wound my hair into a knot around your fist and pulled me to you.

I want you assembled and classified; labelled and catalogued. I want you neat. But these are the aspirations of the full moon and the locked ward.

I manage an untidy drawer, a cupboard door that won’t quite shut, gaps on the shelves. Who could cross-reference this?

And so I have let go. I have stopped digging, the digging easier than the stopping. I have quieted myself.

Still, even so, memory opens like a cut.