By Michael Farrell.
Standing on a hill, above the tree line, becoming unsexed, in the wind.
A storm is percolating, and the choruses of an Olympic-scale tragedy
rehearse. Withdrawn from the doomscroll of an urban elite – of which
I am normally, proudly, one – to the evocation of blood in the Channel
Nine newsreader’s cadence, and then, step back further to the streets
of, let’s say, Laredo, where you were born: between the high school
and the nursing home – or, in a less pedantic reading, between
the sawmill and the river – and raised, between the Catholic church
and the train station – and the equation of collateral damage begins
To filter through. It takes an age, a certain age, to see the big sky. It
takes time, too, to understand the jurisdiction of the actual gods. Death
by drowning, machine, gun. Death by fishing holiday, death by road,
and flame. Death in lurid sight. Live with it. Live with compassion,
kindness; for a long time, such sayings were mere maxims, yet become
real enough in the vicissitudes of life’s rodeo: if we want to heal, if we
accept our metamorphosis to the next stage, dying only metaphorically.
Standing on a hill, above the tree line, above the temporality of feeling,
in the wind. A storm is rattling, and the choruses of a Gallipoli-scale
Mystery play rehearse. Fanta-crested cockatoos dominate their section.
Triangulated by geography and earthquakes, by abuse and knick-
knacks, by distance and painful proximity. Teachers survive to take
P.E., but it’s rugby league every week, every week. It is not a sad year,
quoth the Queen, compared to the years of the Vietnam War. I see her
float over, like a skywhale, and the alarmist birds go WTF,
and the serene birds swoop below and above. The beans grow, the iron
seats swing with ghosts, that leave the world as rusty as they find it, do
they miss their DNA, with all its grief and evolution? Not likely.
