On The Deck With Anne

Spent the day in the Big Smoke, back at twilight. My gal's out musicifying. Garbage out, then locked up in the shed, till takeaway. It's about that time the bears do their midnight smorgasbord raids. Cashew butter (for me) on toasted olive bread. On the deck with a tall-can of Tuborg, a Cuban Guantanamera Christales (tired of waiting for some couple's baby to be born), Anne Sexton, and my pink mini-whale iPod stuffed with Rory Gallagher, Eddie Hinton, Chan Marshall and co.

"Dead of a dark thing, John Holmes, you've been lost/"*

The white-haired semi-retired chap across the street is watering a plant. Four vehicles in the driveway, and it's quiet. Tupperware party, Baptist meeting, or three-generational in-dwelling? Across from him, two of the Catawampus Kids out the front door. The three-quarters blind teen held, caressed by her boyfriend, then both away on his double skateboard.

"If this is death and God is necessary let him be hidden/from the missionary, the well-wisher and the glad hand."

The strawberry leaves, a score of green cupped hands. The basil and japonica, from their separate pots, arch and touch like shy lovers. A mosquito, grey mote, draws vanishing hieroglyphics in the dusk. The last ground robin forges a multiple hop-and-stop on the side lawn, and Chrissie Hynde falls out my ear as I alert the bird, our behemoth cat Sabrina making a dash for the nature-toy. The black-letter outline is almost a uniform shadow on the page. A front porch light, beacon through the massive four-poster-boled fir branches, shines.

"John Holmes, cut from a single tree, lie heavy in her hold/and go down that river with the ivory, the copra and the gold."

*All quotations from Anne Sexton's "Somewhere In Africa".