After Brian Eno’s In Dark Trees
Someone wakes from fever-dream, knows: this city was built on salt-marsh.
Can still feel the tide-pull, though the ocean was drained.
They stumble out for water. We have all grown used to the tip and sway,
the movement of floors.
The city hums and moans as the wind splits
around towers that flex and bend like reeds.
The ones who wake in the small hours with small ones,
or sit up with the old ones—those who count the pause
between breath—they go to the window, remember
the cool and the movement of air.
The city pitches and croons as the wind
slides resonant and high-rise breath over reeds.
The lovers who have no place to love drive up to the ridge,
watch the last moon sink in the sea—those lovers who have no words
who have nothing but smoke, who have
open windows—they know a love song.
The breeze rises from the sea, carries the hiss
and twist of salt. Some nights the city murmurs the reeds—
other nights she wails.
One January night the north blew in, hot and dry, plucked
and strummed at tram wires and clattered about street signs.
That night the city shrieked and hollered
and spat the name of the boy who left
her alone, empty, waiting for the sun.
Notes:
Dark. Trees. Movement. Trains? Clatter. Clatter. Trees. A city of trees? Tall, height. Slide. Sliding
melody. Tension. Steel wire. Beeat, vibration. Clatter. Percussion. Destination. Wind.
Immersive. Music all around, not “over there”
Size? Adelaide size.
Age: timeless. Timeless forest city. Too ewok. Not building a city of trees. Not
a forest. Another landscape. How else to build a tree-city. Wood? Music. Reed. Wind. Sax. City as
sax. Sax is voice. Sax is a lover. Lover-city.
Climate: hot, tropic/semiarid. Not forest. Sea. Sea-
reed. Population: who is here? Dark, night. Ethereal, not governance. Being. Night shift on the
balcony. Hospital. Nursing homes. Garbage trucks. Isolation. Disbelief. Dysphoria, disconnection.
The city is the same as any other city, up close. No music in the midday city, the clatter and bellow
of minting of coin, the bellow of hooves (??what?)
Shift workers heard it first, the 4am stillness before the launching of garbage trucks and the
lurching first commuter train. Hoping to see the first sun…
Night-waking. Wandering.
Kathryn Reese lives in South Australia. She works in medical science. Her writing explores themes of nature, myth and the possibility of shape shift.
Her poems are published in Neoperennial Press Heroines Anthology, Paperbark, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Yellow Arrow Journal. Her flash fiction ‘The Principal and the Sea’, was published by Glassworks and received a Best of the Net nomination.