Figs, Figures and Figureheads

RAIN IS never pure but it feels good on my tongue. Nothing is ever pure but it feels good on my tongue. Nothing but rain has passed through my imagination for days and yet these translucent drops fall into that membrane and out the other side like copper. An autumn of bronze and green. Cymbals spin past my head. The funeral? A congregation of broken fuses, of gone-out light bulbs, comes clicking back to life as people spoke. Soggy red jewels gleamed and rattled in their old aortas. The people in the nave murmured like a cornfield of black cotton heads. My father was burnt to a crisp. He rests in that porcelain chrysalis at the front of the church like the icing from a cake of burnt novels. Someone placed a single clammy fig next to his body, a Lilliputian at the beck of a giant, and read “the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind,” from some part of the Bible. “I love the Bible, it’s so absurdly accurate, so absurd, so accurate.” I remember him saying that. That ash is not my father. These letters are not my father. “You must remember son, all things are relative. One god in ten makes it. I’d say that’s about right. I mean what’s a god? An idea? A father? A lover?” My hair, like fat leeches, bleeds rain into my tears. I wipe them. Most of my father’s trees were there. Ben Pigeon (Pink Horsechestnut, 1982, if the front door is 12 o’clock he is 2:30) turned out to be as interesting as his foliage suggests, an artist who designed the fiver. He numbed me, “Your father was the sole inspiration for the sun on that note, he made me look at it differently.” Maggie demant (Japanese Mapel, 1999, due west) numbed, “He couldn’t possibly have loved your mother any more. It’s just not possible for a human being to love more than that.” Vincent Moon (Sycamore, 1997, in line with the new electric pylons) informed me that “He asked me to look after his will, it’s fairly straight forward, he left it all to you.” He hands me the frail reincarnated pages bound by a white plastic spiral I puncture the silver seal of a box of wine like a fish eye. I leave. I walk back towards the house in the sponge strangling sky, Mary orbiting – a moon always at six o’clock as I spiral straight. I walk up to the road and look back down towards the house. A confetti of soaking dust, a deluge of melting glass softens my shoulders. Just then I notice a strange vehicle honing into view. It is a wooden cart being pulled by an old man; the metal spokes grinding the shrapnel of the roadlike teeth being crushed into a mortar by a pestle. As the rickety blue wood and brown bolts approach closer through the drizzle I notice that a horses stuffed head has been fixed to the front of the cart. On the flat of the cart lies another, full-bodied horse staring out of an eye like a lame universe. The man has hair like a candy-flossed cloud, a tongue as hard as the road, taught skin and a learned smile. He looks up at me from his arched back. “Out for a walk?” I nod. “My horse got lame, have to take him home, the master becomes the mistress, or the mistress becomes the master, you know what I mean. He’s been heroic everyday til now, like Michael the First,” he gestured to the stuffed head, its eyes had “Golf is Life” embossed on their perforated white balls. “He was such a good horse, and now poor Michael the Second’s on his way to the glue factory in the sky.” He whimpered. “don’t you mean horse heaven?” I say. “Oh yes, that’s right… Still must be getting on. No time for horsing about!” He burst into laughter, his blazing whispers of hair at the mercy of this heavenly acupuncture. Michael the Second’s head dripping wet on to the whale skin of the road. I walk and watch the old man’s image and cargo disseminate past a startled, soaking Mary. As I se the house an out of control police car, its engine bleating, its lights fuelled by petrol bombs and channeled into two cones of yellow comes steaming past me and crashes into the first fig tree on my left. The ancient trunk gives like it is filled with a person on a stage not wood and then sags onto the bonnet. The door swings open and a woman I recognize flops onto the grass, clutching a bottle of whisky that swills and evaporates from her wrist. She crawls for a few metres and then raises herself up. “There you are!” she ejaculates. “Wanted to speak to you,” she wipes the mud from her shins. “Let’s get you inside.” “No, I need to speak to you here.” I start walking and she follows. “I am just going to say it before I get sober enough to not say it: you have a sister, my daughter, she was with me the other day when we came around with my mother. I will love your father until I am dead.” She pauses. “Are those toes?” The headlights of the police car set the compost heap alight. Mary had caught me up. Stars fall like figs on to a white bonnet. Figs, Figures and Figureheads continues next week.ARCHIVE: 5th week MT 2005