01/03/2018
I. Api
The veranda is empty of the cats now, but it’s their smell, their evergreen p**s that still echoes sharp as pine needles in this winter city’s cold. The outside door is fragile and half set with loose glass and has been ajar through a night filled with wind. Reaching in like the talon cartilage of some mythic arctic bird a hard finger drift of snow stretches across gentle mounds of faded linoleum, lunges at floral patterns nearly gone. Though of this white place these will be the new beginnings of memory the cat smell will continue to elicit the most powerful of the few phrased remembrances which have journeyed with me. It is in Tullamarine, in the airport, in the warm rain of dawn. It is the wet, licking open the eucalyptus leaves that dangle flat above the path to the terminal. This wintergreen fragrance of memory will always abide by me, rising often, pungent like menthol in my mind, unbound by the already heavy snows of this season.
I stare through double-layered windows and see that the bone white silence surrounding this house will allow no smudges of other worlds. Evocative strokes and charcoal outlines from by sunburnt landscape are bleached from this one. Three or four do survive, oddly only those arboreal, including silhouetted trees concealing cicadas, their repeated treble crescendos like fractured sirens warning of rain which nears from the sea. There are the erratic dill tops of the gums scattered in the paddocks, and the deciduous plane trees planted throughout the suburbs, their cabbage sized leaves bronze and perfect emblems plastered upon gray autumn footpaths especially in the southeast. And there are the sculpted cypress hedges that loom over weathered fences of neatly sawn palings along the front gardens of Malvern, pruned and shaped to resemble dense sponge, absorbing the surrounding green, primordial worlds being bred deep within the thickets.
In the albescence of this winter city I can find only these archeological shards of memory and even they, as I speak them, hang in the frigid air for moments as distinct vapour, holographs visible in the breaths I exhale, and disappearing into ice crystals perhaps to fall as rain in the land I have left. Here, in this winter of the death of Mrs. Luschak, all these phrases of memory are embodied words, but nerve free. Hollow acapella chants sent adrift. They serve merely as mementos, the stock blurbs of glassy brochures compiled for the packets of visitors who would come to look but would never truly see the fragments of the world that had already been witnessed for them. It is constantly below zero in this northern world and the spectrum of my southern language is drawn into the prism crystals of the snow and trapped there, or, if reflected onto the white surfaces of this place, then only as an overexposed glare where nothing is seen.
This January cold suddenly squeezes me and, as if a stroke, paralyzes the perceptions I had known. It is the snow which sifts into the cracks and silences of my recall, which fills me with new words, spoken by descendants who still roam near the shifting northern pole and who continue to know no other world than this. I now say qali for the snow that collects on the boughs of evergreens or tops of stumps, and kanik for the hoarfrost that forms vertically on the sides of posts. The wind hardened drifts shaped into arrowheads are kalutoganiq and kimoaqruk are the fingerdrifts that form downwind even now from the clumps of lampblack earth which lie overturned at the sides of my godmother’s grave at the cemetery on the outskirts of the city.
Ah, Landlord. I have been deified by the testation of Mrs. Luschak, the last testament and will of my godmother. And I am truly a landlord, for there lives a tenant upstairs, though we’ve yet to meet. And, of course, it’s true that I am a landlord in a city where no true land surface is seen, whited out by the snows with which I descended as I passed through the turbulence of their clouds.
