Amanuensis

By the time I have arrived in the hotel room

and pushed through the gauze curtains

to see the sun, flat from this angle, sink within

minutes behind its own ribbon of gauze,

a distant cloudscape of embarrassed whisper,

I am some half day absent your little face.

You turned three on Saturday, likely the first

birthday that carried some resonance

to seperate it from all the other playful days.

But now I am here with you over there,

the first time since your birth that work travel

has become inescapable, try as I have.

To fight the grief when you are not pressed

to me tonight, not ‘morrow on bikes to

spin off into isometric concrete wonders,

I have committed to take witness re:

what is in your father's head (at thirty eight)

as I footfall this beachside destination,

as I see this sun fall into the ocean, I swear

it flickered like a light bulb on a bad

circuit, backlighting clouds when it touched

down into the ocean. Tomorrow the

newspapers will talk about an energy crisis

with not enough power on the grid,

not a coincidence in my eyes, just like the

skyline here painted in vibrant hues, it

is not saturated by chance, no - these reds,

akin your highly oxygenated blood

spilled through so many skinned knees,

they glow via Tongan volcanic dust.

I want you to know I love being in my head,

not as much as I love you of course,

but most of the time it is a joy (lucky as this

is what it means to be alive). And not

just being in my head organising my survival,

but sensing and thinking in splendour.

I like looking at the jetty cast out from

the shore and examining its piers,

associating them with recent films seen,

a Harmony Korine movie, of Florida,

and as storms build in Winter monochrome,

feathering the air with broad shadows, I

think of Sebald as I pass by the carousel

unmoving, the sparkless dodgem cars,

the grand hotels leaning into shy rainfall

reminding me of his Rings of Saturn,

a scene where he sits in a dim pub with

a plate of fish and chips, as for him as

too for me here, revelling in quiet bleakness,

like being in an Edward Hopper painting.

You see what I'm doing, all of this is linked,

in no cosmic sense, goes without saying,

but because subjectivity is analogy - thoughts

can only rise to awareness in familial pairs.

There are bulldozers on the beach here, they

push the sand into underground funnels

to move excess grains some kilometres north

because the coast doesn't migrate as it

should due to the necklace of hotels (energy,

volcanoes, static sand, out of our hands),

I listen to a song by this noisy post-rock band,

they have a tune called She Dreamt She

Was a Bulldozer, She Dreamt She Was Alone

in an Empty Field, and they also have a

tune called ...'they don't sleep anymore on the

beach...', which fits into this landscape

like sand into a vacuum funnel. As my father

taught me, through cassettes from the

public library of classical sobriety, music is

serious stuff, time's salvation, and as one

piece rounds out its orchestral distortions, the

interlocution of guitar into cymbal, of

chime into melodic bassline folding to a close,

while a man releases a trolley filled with

dirty bedding into the street, rolling straight on

towards a tram, to which he languidly reacts

by skateboarding over and lightly tugging the

trolley away, looking immensely put out

by gravity, by the existence of the tram, by me

looking at him (he calls out at me, I have

headphones on, and you know me, 6 foot 2,

stubborn postured and aloof in my toffee

raincoat, I'm all good my lad, so too will you be),

and the playlist on my phone recommends

three hours of ambience because this is what

music is right now, for you at thirty eight

I can't predict, but in two oh two two we seek

near formless songs where one piece is

indistinguishable from the next, splinters of

silence interrupting dust crackle and the

pad of muted piano hammers reverberating like

a bulldozer sleeping in an empty field, it

makes sense in our insomniac age, I totally get it,

but what I seek more than this is apogee,

symphonic climax, emotional revelation driven to

bursting threshold - when Beethoven's 9th

reaches through the atmosphere (the hole is

still up there from where he first broke on

through) - analogy for mountain peak, cresting

wave, to all the trajectories that rise into

fall. Ambience is infinity, intentionally timeless,

and with you at three of course I understand,

I want to keep you at this age forever, for things

to never change, but only for a while - soon

I get my bearings, I spy the coastline, the planes

coming in from beyond the horizon to land

behind the hotels, fly in one window and out the

other, and I want you to one day stand here

where I am standing, to have a head full of potential,

to see the fairy lights wrapped around the trees,

the geodesic structures that lovers sit in down here,

the love heart sculpture that one of the couples

asks me to photograph them near, I take a hundred

pics, you should have seen the way they kissed

as I snapped shots from different angles, it made

me laugh afterwards. My little man, I want you

to look at the same white sailboat I am looking at

now, floating on the thin line between sky and

sea, and feel as I do: an ease, an imagined voyage,

one that I will think of tonight in your absence.