Leaving, Where He Goes, & Orange flowers light up the shrub by Persephone Fraser
Leaving
Two sticks come out of the mud where my grandmother grew up. Towering white sticks, in a plane of muddy water, carp thrown on the bank where somebody had been fishing, still flipping and writhing. The hume. A few keen souls 100 metres in and only knee deep, reaching rods over head. Body of water reflecting the sky in the middle of the orange land, the big dry. I put the photo down.
At the sink, reddy oil sits on the dish water, moving like cells reproducing and condensing. I ingratiate my hands in it, let them hang in the water. They are skirted by that duplicating and separating film. There is the blur of noises still, but I stop hearing your voice over the tv and think about the plates, and plates on the earth, coming together and pulling apart and whole millennia and how the stars didn’t even watch, so far off and so much bigger, and how each shiny perfect reddy circle is quickly absorbed and forgotten, then replaced again, and how we’re all always leaving, and I wonder where she is.
Where He Goes
They brought out a 200 tonne crane to dig up the palm tree and plant it by the steel box office. The truck howls down a long empty road, huge tree- not one of our trees either- strapped to the back, leaves battered by the wind.
They would come to the empty homes he said, and the trees would be full of fruit, and they would take the oranges and lemons back to the office before demolishing the home, the streets. Demolish the home and bring back an arm full of abandoned oranges.
You can imagine the boots in the dirt, coming upon these abandoned spaces- he reassured they were derelict, now that the whole area had been bought up by the mine- and taking some small thing, an orange, a tree.
Like walking on the moon. Like arriving in Chernobyl, almost.
He says they will never replace all of the jobs in the mine with machines, impossible. They cannot be replaced.
He says people think of mining as this bad thing, this bad thing. They kept the tree. Tall old palm. Landmark. Alien. Sitting in the red dirt by the container office.
Orange flowers light up the shrub.
The green is dark and cold, in the shadow of the mountain. The sun is climbing the sky, but hasn’t found its peak. In the dim of this still maturing day is the glow of orange flowers.
There is the soft shimmer of the silver side of the long leaves, turning back and forward in groups. Silver against the depthless blue. I walk on, a stranger to the orange dust. It sparkles under the great sun. Time suspends, walking along the long, high spine of the mountain, the landscape and colours constant.
I see an opening, an invitation away from this path and down to the valley below.
The trees move closer together. The dust turns to thick mud and the sun permeates in fine rays into the darkness. I hold trunk and branch and rock as my feet stumble down the descent. A foot slips, and stones fall over the ledge. Hooked arm over branch, grazed and muddied, I think, nearly.
I lean forward to peer down, one hand clawing at the rock behind me. It is a short way forward to my destination, but a long way down. There is a rope tied around a root.
You won’t find much of anything from Persephone on social media :(
