Dead Straight Meanders

The green trellises are split into jigsaw pieces. They are split into pieces by fern trees, crooked, which bear the furry yellow balls I have piled on my lap so as to eat the nuts inside. Behind the trellis is a sort of junkyard patrolled by desert dogs with thin bodies and long tongues. There is an iron crucifix on a padlocked wire gate leading to another junkyard. In this hostel garden, four cats doze wherever the sunlight splits the green canopy into pieces and my notebook dances with ferny silhouettes. When the sun leaves, so do the cats. The heat of the open air and menace of those dogs keep them from lying on old car bonnets or tin roofing next door.

Yellowed by pollen, a table tennis table supports the weight of a picnic set spread out in readiness for lunch. But thirty minutes pass and then an hour passes and still nobody comes to eat. And when finally it becomes a fixation spoiling my rest I struggle out of my hammock to see if the plates are dirty. I walk by a tree with bright pink flowers, full of singing birds. One offers a guttural mating call that sounds more like a frog – his tiny chest heaving from the strain. Onions are frying somewhere. In the corner of my eye a mannequin appears. An armless legless female with tongue-like aloe leaves where her head should be, cinched at the waist with barbed wire. A garland of thorns uprooted from an absent head and slid down over those shoulder stumps has settled at the crest of her perfect plastic hips. She is decorative. She is massacred for art.

Her image makes me pause a moment to consider a sentence that has been turning over in my mind, since I haven’t written for perhaps a week.

It seems to me that he is chewing a crown of thorns; the holier his words get, the bloodier his gums.

Nothing else has come to me in connection to that fragment. It is a garden among junkyards. All it will ever be is one of the growing block of sentences referring only to themselves, belonging to no greater whole, which I have added to so prolifically in recent times. So large has the block grown that it is now almost tangible, a dark and forbidding barrier to fluid thoughts, a second set of eyelids. People sometimes call it ‘writers’ block’.

Dam a river though, and the pressure, the energy held in reserve by the wall is akin to a concentration of untold distances, a summation of forces from the entire river before that barrier. Were the wall to burst, the currents immediately afterward must run freer and more powerfully than could ever have been possible without the initial dearth of the blockage. Plates, crockery, knives – everything is spotlessly clean. Soon, however, a group of drunk guests consign it all to the dust and pollen and nut shells of the ground so that they can have a game before their own lunch. And I break the tip off an aloe leaf to rub its riches over my cracked hands. Then I sink back into my hammock.