ordeal

The opening often carries thoughts of nature. Clouds and climate the clearest start. A parallel voice – a trot before cantor, a pointed gallop. Impressive metaphors are nestled in nature: wood and trees and some path therein, midst bramble and bear;

folly, dyke, mist, fog – impositions, recollections;

fledglings chirp and pigeons plague; a lake, a ruin, a hillock and scarp. Everywhere rich, colour, depth and breadth – mourning, stirring, sleeping, rising. Tributaries conflate and so too rivers, the effluence from rainfall flushing and flooding. From global to seed. Emergency: growing. Not dangerous dying – deciduous, milk teeth, green leaf and hedgerow – a purposeful letting, compost and hoe.

Fall back, spring forward – yardstick, livestock, harvest and sow. Measures of time, cycles of growth. How long, how far? – how much, until? A year in April – rooted and slow.

Our minds are small – wait and see – that time is over and gone to sea. Yesteryear is cold, and tomorrow on hold. And there you have nature – an icon, micro-macro, climate, a tree.

It’s quiet. Quiet for now.

Except for the miniature turbines in my laptop racing to keep cool, and carelessly collecting dust complicit in its eventual, inevitable demise.

Somewhere above there’s a high-pitch whine, an overtone. As I home-in on the streaming noise searching for suitable, descriptive words it penetrates and settles in my consciousness. It pains. A cerebral pitch I relegate to the periphery and move on to some other more endearing feature.

A hammering in the hall. A bird flutters out-front. Music and imaginary voices. A hammering cringe.

The familiar, remote and endless motorcade muffles on along First. Medics peruse molecular and cellular aberrations that shorten life through myopic binoculars on York. Flummoxed by viruses. Unkempt, yet proficient. And the blossom falls, regretfully, and summer approaches fearlessly edging towards birthdays and past sighs.

A non-migrating New York pigeon gossips or complains at the window.

The fridge kicks in. Chattering, night and day, she’s the stalwart. Welbilt. Respectfully serviced and maintained. The principal of the opera. Periodically defrosted with impressive method and manufactured steam, and elbow grease. Infused with an ever-increasing respect and appreciation for how much things cost, and an attitude of preservation or determination.

A chorus. A foreign, exciting cacophony to blank out other noises. Whispers. And back slaps.

A hammering in my right temporal lobe. A reeling somewhere in the anterior. A deep-rooted yearning emanating from some neurological textbook term or, perhaps, deep deep in my gut. A primitive response awaiting us all. It will be a holy week. Too many have passed me by. Somewhere amidst the blend of bliss and the crushing, finite, long-division of my self-determination there’s a turn.

Hanging on. A spinning turbine, a company of pistons, rotor blades, trolleywheels. . . spinning profusely round and round in everyone’s life. A myriad of distraction and spin. Self-belief and very reasonable self-promotion n’ preservation. Always melodic, evolutionary. And temporary. Revolving round some purpose. Fuelled by little things. Aroused by the little time left.

A welcome jolt marks a change and carries me through to the next.