Issue 33: Alex Priestley

Dérive

2

Difficulty at the beginning – or the struggle to attain form – I would like to reserve some land for open space – but I am told by the planning committee it can only be allocated for building – okay – here I am building a house – and I am leaving the remainder open – a house against a background of open space – the walls are nevertheless – the walls are even so – the windows are in other terms – the windows are in view of this – a house against a background of open space – a house against a background of ground – not vacant – but playing against the walls a discreet music – we could call it coming soon and in the meantime – they sit side by side, their lines cross to make a calendar with blank spaces – as if they could bite through each other. The following morning – a small tree in a square pot appears beside the door – how can I describe it? On the fifteenth day it sprouts a word – but someone moves to stand in front of it. Something blue moves in front of a cloud.

4

Only the ideal measurements and a lifetime of getting ready. How many stones? How much paper? They are building a monument to something. First, the legs must be made strong by lifting. Cylindrical block is settled on cylindrical block – they add up to make a number of columns. They stand together in a colonnade, they must hold up the sky, they stand in fear of retribution – retribution for the belief that they could hold up the sky, that they could get underneath it in the first place. Burying its feet in the ground, the colonnade runs from one morning to the next and holds the sky aloft. Centuries have passed in this way. No one remembers how far it goes back. It is said to mark the edge of the territory, the point at which the body passes out of sight. Sleepwalkers are often seen wandering in its vicinity. Not so long ago, we were sitting together in a park. The ground was cold and dry, but things were budding, things were starting up. Parts of the colonnade could be seen through the trees, as if it were hopping through the branches. You said to me that once, during a time in your life when everything had reached a state of impasse, the monument suddenly revealed itself to you in its entirety. You explained it the way people explain life flashing before their eyes. Although you knew you would never see it like that again, save in your dreams, you realised then you had already won, for you now understood that while more was built on to the monument every day, it never actually grew in size, and that the sound that always used to wake you up at night, though unlikely to ever cease, would disturb you no longer.

5

Still setting up here. New tenement blocks of white as white as the paper they were meticulously drawn upon. Some trees to aid the imagination. I am standing by a door, whispering to an apartment intercom. The doorstep is powdered with builders’ dust. A sprinkler spits and turns. Can I hear the chirr of insects, or is it a thin electrical buzz? The roads are wide and empty. I passed no one on my way here, except one person. Her hair was blowing in the wind, but I don’t remember there being any wind. I walk around to the side of the block, and look expectantly at the window. A figure looms on the other side. The window looks expectantly back at me. There are freckles on my forehead and under my eyes. The camera is held close – I am totally hemmed in by the architecture. Any sign of my intentions remains flush with the building’s vertical thoughts. The camera moves closer. The walls appear to be finely textured – something, just on the edge of vision, is speckled inside them. I am only ten minutes away from the thing that is going to happen when the streetlights come on, when a car sits motionless at the side of the road with the engine running. The hopes of these smooth, wide roads. That they may lead us to an idea, to these tenement blocks that stand waiting for their literature. The desires of these smooth, wide pavements. Something glacial is moving beneath them.

7

– this house – the shape of the dream – this each-house – this every-house – an urn – lain in persistent draughts – lain in transit – walls you can see through – a centre that cannot be known – the items of furniture you have arranged in each room – they face in many directions – but they all point towards it – like compass needles, or the feet of saints – that centre of boredoms – centre of solitudes – this house – the shape of the dream – the house moulding the body, the body moulding the house – through habit – perhaps the house moulds the body into postures of moulding the house – perhaps habit is formed in the dream, and the dream moulds the body – the dream is apt to wander – dissolving boundaries, forming new ones – and yet it is always housed in the body – the body that lies still in the house – this house – the shape of the dream – you – as warm as the bed you would like to get into – a reading lamp – as bright as the memory of sunlight dripping down a brook – each persuading the other to stay – some civilisations begin in houses – some end in houses – although we build a house wherever we go – even momentarily, as we walk beneath an overhanging tree – for we are bathed in house-light – and we dream – even momentarily, that we may wake as a seed sprouting inside its fruit – wake – in a house deep in the ground, or high in the atmosphere –

8

I place a camera on the windowsill, looking out. I set it to record and leave the room, closing the door behind me. At sky level, everything is slow, everything is yet to happen. It is making a living picture, configuring light as a brush configures paint. The bright façades, the stoic water towers, and the columns of air between them, rising from the streets in warm plumes before cooling into cumuliform turrets. The dew point of thought. Perhaps when we look at the sky, we are looking at our own thoughts and feelings – including, one supposes, this particular thought about looking at the sky, but in infinite regress. Some airborne specks of dust or pollen could be enough to set them going. Sometimes they spread out into the stable surrounding warmth – something familiar, recalled, intimately blanketing the sky. Sometimes, when the air is cold and impassive, they climb up higher and higher before funnelling out into glaciated anvils, like cartoon anvils, threatening to fall and squash us as at any time as though each were held on a string by an Old Testament God. Set adrift, they lose their form in a perpetually cresting gesture that expresses their form, solid and principled enough from moment to moment, but by evening totally dispersed. Some of the buildings crowd beneath their shadow, some lie drenched in the sun. Each time we could have met each other again, I would have said something completely different. These buildings are the only obstruction, and the only pathway between us. Something is tuning up on the rooftops – it is a billowing up somewhere north of the coming spring, though the taking off and putting on of coats in all weathers will surround it.

Alex Priestley is a writer from Leeds, and currently based in York. His recent work has appeared in Propel Anthology, Poetry Online, La Piccioletta Barca, and elsewhere.

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