Smoke, milk and salt.

Waiting for an Odyssey.

written messily at the top of a page in my notebook (currently a dark blue)— is written

                 Was I born with a poetry inside of me (here there is a little stain on the page, what I can only guess is a mixture of salt water and coffee), a blessing or a curse and when do I know I have gotten it all out of me (!)  and is this some cruel trick by fate to give me all these words and never a voice 
                                           -- the sea at my feet  
                                                         swallow me and my words. 

dated: June 19th.

image from June 19th. Salt in summer.

I remember that day— the mundanity of it. It was hot— hot and I remember waking and thinking perhaps the summer had come after all. That all my prayers in winter for the spring to come and pass into summer had finally been granted. It might have been the evening before or perhaps the evening off— at least some day around this that I had re watched La Collectionneuse. I remember that day, waking and the heat already on my skin. I remember waking, but dreaming of the ocean— and how many hours I have spent dreaming of the ocean. Mamma and I getting coffee and then walking across to the beach. Quiet. Still. The smell of salt- hot, and there was a smell in the air— that smell of summer, salt and skin and something milky and smoke and (perhaps not this day, but another— yet it stuck with me and for me it is now a smell I will always see as summer), someone was smoking a cigarette standing with their feet in the sea while I rubbed sun cream ( the Greek yoghurt sun cream from korres) onto my shoulders sat on a rock. It was a summer of smoke, milk and salt.

I remember that day and I remember sitting with those rocks pressing into my skin. I remember the feeling of the clothes on my skin, soft and spattered in salt and every so often I’d dip my leg between the gentle lapping of the ocean. There I wrote what is messily scribbled at the top of the page— legs up to my chest watching the water spit up onto the page. I remember the silence. Even with the voices of people in the distance, it was silent. The waves and I. We were two beings merging together and we were two lovers watching each other and we were two beings drifting in the chaos that came before. I remember spring watching a magnolia petal float in a puddle. Then summer came and I watched the sun on the sea. Fallen. Petals on my skin.

—Sea, swallow me, words and all and tell me how I taste. Sea, swallow me and spit up my poetry in the next storm and let it fall on the rocks—

pages on the rocks, hurting my eyes in the suns glow on these

pages that holds words written by someone I will never meet.

I went into the church with salt stained knees and sea swept hair, and it was late afternoon, and it was silent. Silent. Everything that day was filled in silence— and I wish I could remember it better— but I am grasping onto each moment of each day— and I am Tantalus and I am longing— and I am Tantalus and I cannot keep everything forever. I could taste salt in my mouth, milk, my skin was hot and the air smelt like candle smoke and it clung to me long after I left those walls. Those walls asked me why I wept and I said I had left my lover at the beach and do not know if their travels will be safe. I had left my lover at the beach and did not know when I would see them again (I would see them every day, even if from a distance, because I do not go a day without seeing the sea).

—it’s full of them, roaming like incense smoke—becoming and unbecoming, they are ripe and waiting, their silence, incese smoke, become I and I will become you—

walls I’ve wept within and walls that have held me

On the bench outside I ate the dried figs that had become warm in my bag on the church steps and then I walked between the houses un-shelling pistachios. My footsteps echoed around me. It was hot and the houses where shade and I’d stop and look around— silence. The sea in the distance— the church somewhere around these twisting pathways. Silence.

fig tree where I listened to the church bells

and I miss the silence and primordial passion of summer.

Beatrice.