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Real as Dreams

Margaret Wilmot

A Hot January

First publication: November 2005

http://badosa.com/p148

for my mother

1

Your roses in the copper bowl

on the dining-room table, lemon yellow,

salmon, pink, all taking of

each other’s warmth to glow —

as a hostess glows in her guests’ warmth —

overflow, overblow on the empty table

which reflects cool light; beyond

the window a patio, rose-bushes.

2

In the patio the women chat.

Six of them, or is it seven?

One born in Alsace, one rich, one old.

The salad they enjoyed for lunch included

avocado heaped with shrimp of

a most delicate tint bedded on

watercress and romaine. Coffee now.

They chat for years, through grief, divorce,

children lost to drugs, dead in Vietnam.

3

Seeing this postcard of

Hélène Fourment With Children

not as overblown, not as “too” —

just seeing a woman with her children,

a young woman the paint

is swirling to embrace, with affectionate

folds, a soft shadow

screening part of her face,

sheltering even as it reveals.

4

This range of hills, fog,

eucalyptus... Roller-skating

along quiet leafy streets, past

small frame houses, brown shingle,

stucco, brick to a park

at the foot of the hills; climbing up

and looking back, the bay is still there.

Roller-skating to the five-and-ten

to buy a crackly green glass

pitcher for your mother, who came

from somewhere else and fell in love

with a man from somewhere else, who

was building a little house on

an empty lot opposite a school.

5

But if eyes stay open, see

the goat giving birth, see

the blood of birth, this mysterious

writhing beneath a bush in a vacant lot

on a hot afternoon, yielding

bloody issue which needs licking

into life, sees this wet thing

thrust a muzzle, butt

with violence, seize a teat,

suck with extreme violence —

If we see this wonder,

how do we not know

all the world’s not an Eden?

6

When the old Studebaker lurches

on another hairpin-bend, and the back wheels

spin, and all the while the rain

is slanting into the headlights and the sea

is roaring against rocks directly below,

it’s part of the lark, rather

than a precipitous and muddy

bank in darkness — as if we are

always protected, entitled.

And when we finally arrive, finally

in the electric light find a house

elaborate with wall-hangings, tall

curved-neck vases, porcelains and

screens carved with dragons —

find this oriental fairy-tale clinging

to the rocks, it too is part of the lark.

7

Not rock-pools so clear you can see

anemones, soft white crabs, limpets,

a blue mussel, fronds of kelp

and other fronds, so clear

between waves foaming or when

the tide is out that you can see

through salt-water, it’s transparent,

like looking at light on the clearest day:

Not the tide-pools — when

do we stop gazing into

those dark pools that just

throw our reflection back, haloed

in endless circles? When do we

truly see the air along the beach,

this glistening salt kelpy air, is alive

with small flies that live

in clouds waist-high, moving

like electrons in their universe?

8

A child waves a tiny drawing,

irregular dots on the back of an old

shopping-list, informs you gravely

these are “time-flies,” looks bemused

when you laugh. You adore words,

word-play, treasure “time-flies”

till the next patio-lunch when

you all laugh together over

the watercress-and-orange salad,

the cream-cheese sandwiches spread

on Elsa’s German bread. Words

are real as cooking friends

roses, you believe in words...

Even when it’s clear, seeing is

believing, hearing is believing —

but you insist, hold onto the words so

as not to have to face an absence

of love so monumental Hélène Fourment

turned from its chill wind, that wind

which blows off granite. She turned

her mind to her perfect roses.

9

Driving past fields and fields,

long fertile valleys, driving past

men and women stooped

tiny in the sun, picking

for hours and hours grapes

almonds plums, people from

somewhere else, oranges strawberries

beans broccoli lettuce...

Songs in the car and picnics

on the red-checked table-cloth,

smelling of pine-needles or kelp

or hot rock, with friends and tamale pie

and sourdough garlic bread, still warm

in its newspaper and tasting

like nowhere else. Once exploring

we happened on a shack at the end

of a pier where we ate huge plates

of cracked crab and it was so cheap!

We painted cornucopias at school.

“Land of plenty,” they told us, and

the word “birthright” was not used,

the word “entitlement” not used.

10

When we are all from somewhere else —

when all our inherited memories

are of different landscapes, different ways,

not of these hills bare even when

your parents arrived; when

cultural memory dissolves and

only the individual dream

remains —

There’s still place, we share

these hills fast disappearing under houses,

share the trail we walk Sundays

in a dappled light, and the views out

over the Golden Gate, Pacific

opening beyond, or out over

the reservoir towards land covered

within living memory by walnut groves.

11

The moment’s tiny shadows

shiver — our monuments are not

historical, not proportionate —

they are not of a scale minds

can measure: only bodies.

Four fly-specks cling

to granite high above —

Climbers, this is their third day

on the rock-face, a man

says, passing us his binoculars.

12

Sunday there was breakfast in the patio —

blueberry pancakes sticky buns

French coffee cake bran muffins, baking

endless baking. One year

a friend noticed you didn’t repeat

your menu even once. Smells

of bacon and coffee threading

the music, always a record on

and friends dropping in, and sun

beginning to melt the morning fog.

13

A laugh jagged as lightning

drains the patio light; its electricity

flickers, forks — not

the bubbling chuckle of a child

watching Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, not

that delight spilling everywhere

delighting — forced laughter

splayed across the moment

claiming this territory.

14

Driving and the rainbow spans

two mountain-ranges. Not peaks —

ranges which extend along each side

of the five-lane highway. The Honda

skims along, and the rainbow

speeds along too, as fast, as real

as everything else. Real

as the pouring light, or dreams

of voting lower taxes, or water

in the desert for a million lawns,

ten million showers. Real as

these gigantic pylons which sustain

cables thick as bodies.

15

When the printer died — and he was a fine

printer with long experience, much honoured

in his profession — his widow insisted

the shop not close: she would

take over, people would help, of course

they would, they loved him, didn’t they?

And despite expert advice that

jacarandas flourish at sea-level,

do not like height, insisted

four saplings be planted in front

of her house on the hill. “It’s that blue,”

she smiled girlishly, “we both loved it.”

16

The hills are almost built over

now, and it seems strange, a riddle,

that we who lived here so long, who

were born here, should be the ones

to lose our way —

Even the deer

have nowhere to go, they roam;

five large deer can walk

down the street at dusk, wild deer.

Once it was magical to glimpse

a shadow sliding behind

a eucalyptus, know that large animate

presence so mysteriously near...

Deer forage in gardens, love

roses and each evening you cover

yours tenderly with plastic bags

you take off in the morning, out in

the mist floating up from the bay, in

your terry-robe and pink pyjamas.

When you were little, your mother had to call

you in from the garden to have breakfast.

17

Walking along the beach

talking — walking in the white

sand, barefoot one of you,

holding sandals by a heel-strap,

feet aware of the familiar

squeaky sand and how it moves

a little slippery beneath the instep...

Two old women walking

near the ocean in a clear light,

the pain of life hovering

like sand-flies in an own cloud

elsewhere, two old friends just

talking — about lunch and Edgar Cayce

and being together you have

no idea and Sheba getting old,

as they walk along taking deep

delighted breaths of kelpy air.

18

Words dropped onto the moment,

splayed against the moment’s

sweetness, beginning again,

the acid fountain which etches

where it sprays.

It’s impossible

not to hear but it gets harder

and harder to tolerate hearing —

pain spreads through your veins like

a fresh transfusion. You close

your eyes, turn it to ink,

blot everything out.

19

Next visit Gertrude greets us

with a heart-felt cry of relief that

we are not the police, they are pursuing her,

send notices, fines, and every time

the fine is higher, the last fine said $1,000...

She is dishevelled and the cat-box smells.

“Sheba” — her face hurts — “died.

And they steal, now my mother’s jewels...”

It was she who paid your way

out of the mess you got in when

your husband died. A head

she sculpted long ago gazes

down from a high shelf.

That evening the communal dining-room

glows with the shallow warmth

of tasteful murals and potted plants.

“You have no idea” — She picks up

a fork, gazes at it absent-mindedly

and tears infuse her voice —

“how wonderful it is to be with

people who know my past.”

20

One winter evening the young cousins

set the polished table

with Granny’s place-mats and deep blue

Arabia-ware; one found

pink napkins and candles

for the Mexican candle-sticks, one

picked a few late roses.

There was no avocado sliced

in crescent moons on a bed of

sunburnt lettuce near slender rolls

of paper-thin prosciutto, nor

the perfect wine sparkling in the Waterford,

everything sparkling, you too,

sheeny in turquoise as you present

the perfectly poached salmon

and once again bask while

your guests toast triumph.

Not like once upon a time, but

there was boys’ talk, a jingle of glasses,

pumpkin ice-cream.

21

Neighbours die, move. You stand

at the upstairs window gazing out

over the Banksia rose in full thick

blossom on the trellis that forty

years on you still think of as

Isabel’s, across the old badminton-court

Isabel built — now filled with rubble and

pepper-leaves... And the Banksia roses

provide respite from the noise,

the chaos below. You feast

your eyes, blot everything else out.

22

Minnie wondered if we

could come to her to say good-bye?

For years she came to you, chatting

as she cleaned — she knew you needed her

and even perhaps how much.

We glimpse a shelf containing

at least forty hats; she was always

wearing a hat when she arrived.

She pours tea, offers the two of us

enough cakes and sandwiches for

a small cafeteria. No,

she’s not a traveller; James

wanted to go to Africa with their church —

he was disappointed, but

no, she’s not a traveller.

Every surface, every space

is filled with things, loved things —

you can tell. Had we noticed this?

She always turns it on for

the grandchildren — and she chuckles

as a tall tube lights up blue

water where red plastic

fish bobble and bubble.

23

The hills are monuments which

will be there, always. The sea

sucks the lowering sky below

its surface, spumes forth greys

which turn to greens, kelp-mauves,

splash, shatter to foam-blue.

Deceive. Promise that this is sea

everywhere. Yet not even

warm seas in paradise ribboned

turquoise, azure, seas which mirrored

vaults of unblemished cobalt —

not even they were as rich and deep,

given like sleep in childhood.

Your father comes up the street

from the ferry in his familiar hat,

paper under his arm, and the cat

is waiting at the corner to escort

him home to the little house

which he built across from the school.

You know he has a gift in his pocket.

24

Planting daffodils in the dusk

the evening that the house stands empty:

cupboards bare, no polished table —

only a bag of bulbs

overlooked in a corner of the shed.

Planting daffodils in the dusk —

and a doe and her fawn appear

on the still street, miraculous,

dark weight beyond shadow —

and carrying that weight so lightly

on their delicate ankles.