Friday 15 May 2009

When I Was Just a Little Girl

As a girl I was godhungry, I collected them like stamps. Many-armed and jackal-headed, blue-hued and cloven-hoofed, playing the pipes, the harp, the fool, fickle, flawed and fictional. Boy-gods naked, thumb-sucking, silent; bare-breasted girl-gods of sex and the sewers. A god for everything and every god in its place, like so many insects in my killing-jar. The monkey indulged my avarice, bringing me them like a cat brings a corpse. I mounted my gods in scrapbooks and on cork, cataloguing and curating and all the time incredulous that it should be them instead of me.

Tiring of gods like colouring books I began to paint my own. I went to the seaside and found a god at night beneath the waves. I saw the whales hanging, heads-down in the lambent blue, like bombs falling in aspic. I saw the squid slide, their petticoats rippling, their beaks bared for a kiss. I saw seasponges like sweetbreads and the umbilical eels. That wet god sent me jellyfish and prophecies in the flotsam, wood bleached to bone and salt-licked pebbles of glass. I caught birds and carved them, sending them off to sea in paper boats with sails made from hankies. With my worship, the beach grew smaller, the tide sidling higher, the water closing in.

8 comments:

  1. Clever, and it wonderfully describes a collecting instinct that is fascinated with the new, and then discards the new as it becomes old, or when it is no longer useful...

    And this is something that the sea does naturally - that it brings a daily newness to be awed by, baubles cast adrift by others...

    ...and it is in the casting away of that which tenders true awe, that the world or the beach becomes smaller...

    Poet Man

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  2. Gods and fish and children spew from me.

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  3. This is damn good. Look, even the poet-man thinks so, and he's a real live poet-man.
    A few days ago, I though about the mummers parade.
    [that's a compliment]

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  4. That is a compliment and a half. Thank you.

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  5. Of course, the fact that I missed the "t" of off "thought" shouldn't detract from the beauty of my compliment. And man-o-christ-alive is it a gaunlet of passwords and secret signs to post a comment on this blog! What are you scared of? Adverts?

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  6. I didn't know there were any passwords involved, and I have no idea how to remedy that situation. What to do?

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  7. Ignore me. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I exaggerated. It's only one password, to dissuade robots. Probably for the best, you know how they can be.

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  8. Don't get me started on robots. They come over here, take our jobs, send us spam emails, drink up all our motor-oil, eat our swans, carry off our daughters....

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