DWELLING, PART III

‘…the earth cannot become a shelter unless it is unfolded, or disclosed, by human appropriation.’

by Orestis Konis

Shrubs

Dirt track rumble and buzz and the wind blowing in from the sea coming in from all sides in contest with itself distending sound and direction in a medley of gusts of pulls and tugs the north and south and east and west winds in concert pilfering the cool from the cut up waves and distributing it in a melee of staccato bursts and intersecting whips acting like honourable bandits against the aggravating heat that is determined to flatten all activity and movement while hardy juniper trees look after the rocks and tend to the shrubs and provide shade for those small enough to profit and as if in direct antithesis a syncopated groove halves the tempo and keeps the backbeat to the sound of hooves treading the gravel calves with their mothers grazing languidly at their own pace oblivious to the drama of the waves and the wind and the heat unconcerned and sublimely surefooted in their gait the wild donkeys click clack along the edge of the horizon at the end of the world where I am reeling like a compass by a magnet disoriented and most assuredly tasting like nothing to the tongue of this male donkey lathering my bewildered face with its pungent saliva

Shift

Bloated with radiant particles and the shifting panorama of kingdoms become mountains and mountains become strange beasts and strange beasts become veils sheared and dispersed and reformulated again into beasts into mountains into kingdoms swollen and seamless the palladium of the seer and the buzzard and the neck bent at a 90° degrees angle surrendering itself to dusk arriving like a chloroform gauze across its breath for a brief soiree for a brief intermission while any stray strands of light and activity are being ingested and absorbed into the liquid foam of its body cancelling sound and rehashing the senseless turmoil into rotation into an illusory closure into a somber pause with its tongue in its cheek before opening up to the croak of the frogs blinking their eyes in the slime of the stagnant pond releasing its winged fodder before bowing to darkness to crickets and to the surreptitious scuttling and scurrying now at foot to darkness and to the hatching of schemes and predatory plans to the giving way of the buzzard to the owl to the whimpering sobs of my derelict body

Sand

Face down on the anonymous shore slowly coalescing with the granules as they shrink and my pores widen cuts from the hourglass seeping blood bandaged with seaweed a motley of starfish and nubile octopi bruise my tender skin inflaming the sun’s wounds rendering me succulent before I dry and the tide stops circulating my shallow breaths while the turtles under the cover of dark amass in droves and lay their eggs in the patience of ritual and in a shift of primordial patterns one of the matriarchs detects the warmth enclosed in my softened skull and uses her ancient beak to peck through and slowly deposit her offspring in the now hollow recess in the now empty cavity in the now useful cranium previously so fatally enamoured with change and progress yet so terrified and transfixed by the passage of time

Groove

Erstwhile vectors of communication and commerce and everyday movement networking out like the low-end grooves of a rumbling malodorous bass line acting as a stint to an auspiciously mellifluous and spatially indeterminable folk whistle modally bustling along to the interminable rhythm of a slow and gradual process of reclamation attuned to the propping up of carob trees on relics and crumbling stone arches summoning mallows and fennels and nettles and daisies and poppies out of the cracks conducting the timeless chirping ritual of call and answer that welcomes the day and rends the skies fluid and sets out the work to be done by all the different branches of the hospitality sector parallel to all the ground dwellers burrowing and scurrying and slithering in the soil this slow and gradual process encouraging the palm trees to let out their beards ungroomed and regal and the eucalyptus to shed their bark in their own leisurely time all the citrus trees pregnant with unpicked fruit and the acacia spreading wildly rejoicing in the little owl’s daily routine in its high pitched call confusing all the night prowling cats that have slipped past the fences and the barrels and the barbed wires as essential to this blossoming boogie as necessary to this redemptive dance as all the other components that comprise it and naturally I am not invited I am nowhere to be found

Featured photo by Savvas Yerolemides

Click here to read DWELLING PART I and PART II