and says, "It was like this, wasn't it, darling", "I did well then, didn't I, dearest heart?", and she smiles happily across the room with confidence that appals. How can she walk through the streets, so vulnerable, so unknowing, and not have people and dogs and perpetual calamity following her? But overhung with her vines of faith, she is protected from their gaze like the pools in Epping Forest. I see she can walk across the leering world and suffer injuries only from the ones she loves. But I love her and her silence is propaganda for sainthood.
So we drive along the Californian coast singing together, and I entirely renounce him only for her peace of mind. The wild road winds around ledges manufactured from the mountains and cliffs. The Pacific in blue spasms reaches its superlatives.
Why do I not jump off this cliff where I lie sickened by the moon? I know these days are offering me only murder for my future. It is not just the creeping fingers of the cold that disuade me from action, and allow me to accept the hypocritical hope that there mat be some solution. Like MacBeth, I keep remembering that I am their host. So it is tomorrow's breakfast rather than the future's blood that dictates fatal forbearance. Nature, perpetual whore, distracts with the immediate. Shifty-eyed with this fallacy,
I plough back to my bed, up through the tickling grass.
So, through the summer days, we sit on the Californian coast, drinking coffee on the wooden steps of our cottages.
Up the canyon the redwoods and the thick left-hands of the castor tree forbode disaster by their beauty, built on too grand a scale. The creek gushes over green boulders into pools no human ever uses, down canyons into the sea.
But poison oak grows over the path and over all the banks, and it is impossible even to go into the damp overhung valley without being poisoned. Later in the year it flushes scarlet, both warning of and recording fatality.
Between the canyons the hills slide steep and cropped to thr cliffs that isolate the Pacific. They change from gold to silver, grow purple and massive from a distance, and disintegrate down-hill in avalanches of sand.
Round the doorways double-size flowers grow without encouragement: lilacs, nasturtiums in a bank down to the creek, roses, geraniums, fuchsias, bleeding-hearts, hydrangeas. The sea blooms. The stream rushes loudly.
When the sea otters leave their playing under the cliff, the kelp in amourous coils appear to pin down the Pacific. There are rattlesnakes and widow-spiders and mists that rise from below. But the days leave the recollection of sun and flowers.
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