What We Miss when Our Backs are Turned

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1. A playground of only thin steel poles, like limbs reaching upward towards you. The quarry, the kiln, the harbour. A cluster, a rafter, a stack, a pile of stones on a dead end street. Yard, oval, pitch, an athletic surface, or a leisure centre. Indent, underbelly, hollow, cavern, coffin. Constellation, mind-map, to draw a line between each of your sources, to trace a river from origin to estuary. A water well. A metal bucket tied to a rope. The distribution of weight over a post. The optical frame, the picture that sits inside. An olive tree was left in our front garden, signifying prosperity. Your dad tells me an endless drought is coming. Dirt, cavern, earth, hole, a rain cloud that disperses evenly. Excavate slowly, then all at once. You told me there were two people in identical motion. The suburb, the street, a manicured lawn. Plant, propagate, a handful of seeds, a colony of ants.

2. I didn’t step on a single crack on my walk home yesterday. I paced myself slowly, letting people pass me, so as to not position my feet incorrectly. There in lies a certain meditation to avoiding the cracks, an eerie focus. It was cold and I began to walk faster. I am reminded of the nature of a walk like this, where the intent is simple and the destination is close. It mimics the pace that one writes. Everything can be seen as a delicate structure, a balanced pile of timber posts. A walk along the highway, a shining metal tower. A turn around the block, a wooden box with four sides. The commute to the office, a plank between two brick walls. The walk to your house, a concrete stairway with no first floor landing. Once home, I set my belongings on the table. From outside my window I see the space where a building used to be. I imagine I curl my body between the two brick walls and fall soundly asleep. ASMR playing through wired headphones.

3. The invincible summer, the wall of heat, plump and robust. A curtain dividing a space in two. The water source that runs through the urban centre. The heatwave that splits a day in two pieces; the heavy sunlit morning and the long summer night. The fabric moves in the wind, soft, sweaty canvas. Walk from one side to the other, the parallel interior is someone else’s home now. The heat warped information. A splitting headache. A network outage. A flightpath. The main road, the laneway, the backstreet. A city that is at once anxious, naked and proud.