“I appreciate that
it’s a waterbird
but it’s going
a bit overboard,
don’t you think?
-that heron
standing by the lake
with a kayak
strapped to its face!”
‘Waterbird’ by Andrew Lansdown
Waterbird
Month: March 2021
In here
There are people here. They are standing the way people do in bookshops. Feet crooked, muscles tense, the mind not yet absorbed, eyes slinging from side to side. Bones angular and jutting out at the shelves.
Then they disappear into something. Heads drop onto chins. Hands drop to the waist where they hook into jeans or sit on the shelf of the hips. Coats, that were gripped tensely, drop to chairs, or even to the floor. Glasses slide down. Readers hold one book and read another. Necks crank into awful angles to get at titles. Pulses fade. Breathing slows.
Hands, as they are forgotten, curl into crabby shapes, personal and useful. Readers don’t know they have default reading bodies that fold into sculptures of absorption and intention.
Looking at things
There are caterpillars on the grape vine. They are amazing. They are so liddle.
‘Why are they so liddle?’
‘Where’s his mum? Where’s his eyes? Where’s her arms?’
The caterpillars are a nuisance. But today they are astounding. They have a looping liquid walk, so hip that small children must imitate it.
They are the colour of pests.
But this one is crimson, emerald, gold, charcoal, the colour of bees, the colour of lego, of lollies, of excavators, of liddle amazing things. My grandsons hold out hands to help him from leaf to leaf. They offer him extra leaves because she has no mum. They look for her nest, they plan to make him a better house – with a door. Her will love it.
They watch him eat, leaning so close that surely the caterpillar must sense something, but it swings its enormous eyes around and down again, serene over its leafy cabbage, warm under the breath of my grandsons, who won’t come away in case a bit of life happens, and they miss it.
Later they tell Pa, ‘There’s a caterpillar on your stuff.’
‘Is there.’
‘He is. He’s eating everything, her is.’
They are gleeful. Then they go back to sweeping, back to the sandpit, back to the marble run, the biscuits, and the sunlight through the bathroom window lighting up the soggy towel on the floor and somebody’s hat left in the sink and the tap still dripping all over everything.
The news
“Literature is news that stays news.”
Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading
Nice little bookshop
That’s me. I heard it spoken as people walked past the bookshop this morning. They walk so quickly I don’t get to see them. I just see what they think.
He said, ‘Nice little bookshop. Amazing that it’s still going.’
And somebody answered, ‘True!’
I think, well, maybe not so amazing.
Back to Mark Twain. Somebody wants his autobiography – the University of California Press edition in three volumes. As if I could find that and then let it go to someone else!
A group of four sweep past the window. They are all talking hard.
A lady says, ‘Is that sexist?’
He answers, ‘I think so.’
Seven teenagers in a row, loud and clattery. Bent underneath school bags. They are all talking too loud for me to hear it, but I do hear:
‘Uluru. It’s Uluru.’
Then they are gone.
Back to Georgette Heyer and Harry Potter. Back to The Hitchhiker’s Guide. Back to Marcel Proust, Alice Munro, and Irene Nemirovsk.
The door opens and a man leans in and looks at me, retreats abruptly, closes the door. Ok.
Back to Patricia Cornwell. Back to The Odyssey.
A lady I know comes in. ‘How are you, my dear?’ I’m not coming in. I just want to know how you are.’
A man tells me all about The Barossa Valley.
Another man wants to know all about Clayton.
Back to A Gentleman in Moscow, which I have stolen from my own shelves.
Painting by Carol Marine
I am not eccentric
“I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.”
Edith Sitwell, British poet, 1887-1964
Sculpture by Barbara Glynne Prodaniuk
My unedited house
It starts where I sit at the kitchen table looking at people across the road. There’s a small group of them, and they move the afternoon light because the light is loaded with flakes of heat, gum leaf, and dust, and every outline is livid with it.
The people are leaning over a car, bonnet up.
There are dishes and cups here, and one yellow pot at the window, level with the heads over the car outside. Inside, there is also a coffee mug, a tea towel, a phone charging.
There are books on the floor, and a wooden train set with some missing. A bottle of perfume, a set of weights, clean washing (some of it folded).
A bowl of nashi pears, heavy with yellow.
Everybody’s things.
And bookshelves.
I have a low table with a glass roof. Under the sliding panel of glass there are square cavities, each one containing something really good. Polished stone in silky chunks, fossils, a giant leaf that’s not actually that big, carved wooden spoons, pieces of shell, clay, a feather, all those things that have no value but have great value. The glass is scratched now. On top, a wooden petrol station put together and painted by hand, and inside this a plastic elephant and giraffe from a game that strayed into another game. On the top of the petrol station, copies of Hairy McClary and Asterix and the Golden Sickle.
Carpet.
The nashi pears are heavy with yellow. Someone should eat them.
She carried the books; he carried her bag so she could carry the books
This lady has been here before, but I don’t remember her husband. Anyway, she just kept on piling the books up. She found it hard to reach upwards; she asked me to pull this one down, and that one down, and now maybe that one. The books were all classics, and she’d read them all before. She was excited to get Brett Easton Ellis, and then again to get On the Road.
He carried her handbag over his arm. He said to me, ‘You wait, we won’t be able to get all of these in the car!’ And he looked at her proudly.
He walked around the shop. He found one book for himself. When they left, he carried everything because she was reading as she walked and had no hands to spare.
Flight
“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
Leonardo da Vinci
Minecraft, Minecraft
A child sang ‘Minecraft, Minecraft…all the Minecraft” while standing at the window. There’s a stack of Minecraft novels there. He laid both hands palms flat against the glass and continued his interested little song. A piping song, higher than the stack of books. Higher than the window. Then his family called him away.
‘Into the car, come on Dale’
‘Here we go again…’ A older couple at the door turn their phones this way, then the other way, trying to find the right square. ‘Here we go again. Take us half an hour to get in here.’ But they persevere bravely and make it inside. Later, she reads a children’s book to him, out loud, and he edged slowly away.
A young couple went past the cat shelf. She said, ‘Oh my God, a cat shop. It’s a little cat shop. With cat books. That’s cool. Look Evan.’
‘Yeah, it’s cool.’
‘Because of the cats.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I love cats. I need ’em.’
‘Yeah.’
Painting by Mars Black
The Book Keeper Book Shop 