I pick these old seams apart here in my hands here in the sun, in the hands of this city. The long shadow of a tree creeps over my body like the digit of a giant sundial. At one point in time it covers me from shoulder to shoulder, letting me feel the full cold of this still young spring.
Did-you-know-she’s-from-the-other-shore crossing over.
The square is vast and surrounded by troves of benches. It is easy to come here and spend time blended into a body of bodies. The sun reaches everywhere. Everyone here, resting, sitting, meals, music, renting, depositing, bikes, walking, kids, running, cycling, passing. To feel still. A fragile balance of stone. Comfort traded in for stimulation. A pair of legs dangling on each side. Bending-straightening in delight of the rise and fall. Toes lose touch with the ground, heads, too. A familiar fizz in the pit of the stomach. An unfamiliar spontaneous vacuum. And new words.
Benches look the same everywhere, their form follows democratic functions: facilitating a meeting on neutral ground. No upper ground to be had. Your head produces clearer pictures. Dipped in the same soup in which birds are twirling, sometimes seasoned with squirts of pollen. Trees flirting. The distant images produced by stirred surroundings neutralize tenseness that might be stored in the shoulders or hips, the abdomen, the base of the skull. And the eyes that are oversaturated with lucidity delivered by an animated face. There is sourness stored in the muscles behind retinas.
Sometimes the language of the face and hands and arms and shoulders gets so opaque I have to look away. Undoing seams sewn in another country. The same piece of thread renders a cow a shoe and a bunch of socks a top.
Before my eyes, the moneyed and the homeless both consume their packed lunches at the foot of the monument.
By the jester’s feet they all lie like dogs and pigeons and leave each other be. The constant churn of viscera inside the mind. Thick mammal fumes gather in a big cloud above the square. Moving west. Emoting time zones. Shedding coordinates and attached meanings. Traversing, always outmoving utter surrender or, that something that I sometimes call defeat.
Crossing over from one shore to the other. Here is where she comes and drops her body on the warm slabs. Freed like this, she can circle above the square for hours.
Here is where everyone can add their whatever body to a body of other whatever bodies. Here, warm your frame, these yellowed old bones, discolored by the pitiless sun of representative democracy. The world according to, the world as we know it, all drugs and yearning nerve endings. With the untiring churn of motion before your eyes imagine words with foreign meanings. The present lies uncharted. Semantics, attached to the bottom of my shoe in the other country, unnoticed I carried them like that, sleeping, over thresholds. Now they‘re being blown about with the other debris, leaves, paper plates. Dreams like dirt sedimented in the gaps between concrete slabs.
The square dissolving towards its faded edges.
A small bag carrying a lucid substance, not much bigger than a post stamp. Wood, concrete, cast iron, poor durable materials. Evening out former unevennesses. A subtle hand to hand pass across the back of a bench. I feel a distinct stickiness in the bones and muscles. Wooden lattices drown in thick layers of deep green varnish. A bill is passed back. The free market exercised at the foot of a monument covered in pigeon shit and surrounded by a fenced in lawn.
Palms were waving in the North European march winds. Yesterday in conversation with L I called this hemisphere Southern Yourope. Now, palm trees tickle the sky on top of a tall office building touching the square.
Faith in dreams, sometimes collects at the foot of the monument.