do you see what I see

 

 

Parumpapumppum.

Sometimes people like to comfort me when things go wrong in my life by saying, “at least you’ll have plenty to write about”.

This is very rarely a consolation.

I prefer not to think of the fact that Moving Galleries like my poem about my Nanna dying. I wish my Nanna was still alive. I’m still upset about it, and it’s been five years.

I do, however, like to be somewhere that makes me notice things and where I can still be happy and notice them. Like tonight.

I’m sitting in a chair provided kindly by someone’s someone that I don’t really know either someone but they have given me money anyway. Well, not really me, but that’s nice enough in the end. Someone buys me a sausage roll and I buy someone a cup of tea.

The ride out is fast and hard because I don’t know how long it takes and I want to be there on time and the traffic feels really direct and brisk with me and I have only good lights to guide me and a desire to take up lots of space. In the last moment there’s a downhill like flying and then – surprisingly it is all over.

And then – surprisingly, it all begins.

Sitting, talking, thinking, listening. The smell of the grass cooling around us. The dew gathering filigree lace-like shadows appearing from the glint of lights against the condensing grass.

She seems pretty happy with her she and I think that she feels the same. We are telling stories tasol.

The game begins, and no one wants to hear my commentary for I have none, but I am listening and loving the sound of the warm, Australian voices around me, some soft-gravelled, some lightly nasal, some slightly foreign. These voices which are coming in intermittent waves around me feel relaxing and calming, against the sharp and slightly tinny sound of the women’s voices coming from the field. At one point one of the teams chants, presumably something which is stirring and rousing but from further afield across the field in the chill air sounds somehow shrill and strange and alien to me. It feels metallic. The air is so clean and flat and cold that the sounds are vibrating like strange bells.

A little like the sound in snow.

A mist rolls in from a creek nearby, rolling in waves and swirling over the cool grass, catching the stadium lights, milk-covering the players and, presumably, soaking the ball. The play is slippery sometimes, constellation moving sometimes, sometimes satisfying, sometimes unsatisfying.

I watch my player. Then I watch some other players. Then I try and watch all the players, but I can’t hold the visuals of so many stories happening in concert. Like at the symphony, I watch one instrument and try only to hear that sound amongst the many.

So I pick one player at a time and watch her. I watch in systems and in sequences that make sense to me – blond girl, brunette, girl with short hair, girl with pony tail, girl on the pink team, girl on the black time, girl in number four, girl in number 30. I let them bruise my heels as they bruise their own. One team is peppering the goals.

I am salting the wounds.

The bathrooms are International Klein Blue. Some eyes are Tiffany Blue. Some eyes are cutting hazel and steel.

Was there some period at which all football grounds in Brisbane discovered a cheap paint sale, all pedaling that colour beyond the spectrum of computer screens? That blue that you can only see and witness and feel radiating back at you?

Maybe.

I contemplate the word innate.

Somethings are natural, somethings flow to the sea, somethings are like water which just find their own way. Sometimes are easy, sometimes are hard, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you play, sometimes you war, sometimes you flow like water to the sea. Light and fast at first, then old and slow, eventually disgorging yourself into the ocean to be reborn again as something light and fast.