Talking to the bees or (I LIVE) by Felicity Aris
I live in a quiet place.
Where Beachwood benches sit intent on the view of an open expanse of brown sea. Murky white horses now fall flat with despair; mottled and benevolent, the sinew of their existence still hell bent on remaining, on living. Yet they remain, only just breathing - turning, twisting, shaping the tincture of solace that surrounds. Small pieces of pleasure, now writhing on the ground.
It breaks out before you, so placid and melancholy, as you sit and you stare, engrossed by the tattered props and malevolent characters that play out the scene, a scene or a story, whichever you like.
It is a precipice of land with no edge to its dominion, no solace in breaking, the waves that it’s making.
No one knows why it’s so bland. The floor made of clay, the clay made of floor, till nothing remains but one and the other. Soaked into smudges, mud patches burnt into the soil by venerable rays, like the veneer of a shadow when darkness resumes.
Musty air gets caught in layers of ooze, where trapped bugs and spring thrushes swim among the debris, the air, that’s making use of this silence, to whisper sweet sorrows into the ears of each lone creature cloaked and condemned in their filth, as they jump around endlessly, for eternity. Like the faded, fluctuating flickers of an eclipsing wind-up torch, between one spot and another, shade or light, phantom or lustre, grass or sludge.
That’s what you see. That’s what you always see.
Really it is but a desert. A plain, unassuming, ordinary, lonely, stretch of nothing. Those white horses are crags, protruding rocks in a sheet of no importance. There might be life, caught underground, or above, who knows (not I). But nothing much else. There is little to say about it.
So, I won’t.
It is set before me as I sit on my bench. I watch as it sits, sits watching me.
I used to sit on these benches and watch. That’s all I did. Because there is power in the watching, in the waiting. The knight will take the king, the castle, the queen, until all that is left is a chessboard of misfortune, its white and black squares laughing out of time.
No point waiting for what will happen next. There is no formula, no stratagem, no meaning to this game, that we play, not even in this clocked-out land mass that sits before me.