DAY

They lie in wait for gourmet love but are really just declaring time restraints.

Bolder abiders await gourmands, but fees are fees. We love belly cultures:

we know what and how much she ate. Foie gras. Then cod roe. A blood sausage viand.

She is wrapped up in this dramatic progression for the term of her unnatural dreaming,

“If only I could find a pitchfork and a carving knife to cut through all this meat,” she

says. Could we all be wrapped up in butcher’s paper, if we tried? I am the sixty-seven

years of age the demotic parlance of youth turns transparent. Like paper. Lounge.

Lounge and bar. The thudding is all that is left. Could a waiter with an elusive

history rescue her from having to repeat herself? Gourmet Traveller has an article

on pies like your mother made them. The apple. The pecan. The fish. On a plateau,

language loses its momentum like a 4WD with a cracked radiator. Amongst red cairns,

actors are looking for undiscovered ceremonies, like an actual emu’s mating dance,

or even a feather, for a feather might be good for morale. Mishima wears red

shoes of viscera, the old man is dancing (a ghost), Gunkanjima is a real house, a waiter’s

club. The shift workers were lost at sea when? On the way there? Returning? The

view from the shore is terrible. Driftwood. Stones. Driftwood leaden like stones.

All we can avail ourselves is a club. All its memorabilia is maritime flotsam, photographic

memory pinned to paper, and one big awful gun. Nevertheless, we eat better

than the inlanders. Baths for rainbow trout. Farms. There is something to be learned

from dense populations. And so with the banquet set, mother’s salary in the

can, cutlery polished, we sit down  to eat. Publicly, she compares the health of her

hair to the burgeoning length of her twelve-year-old daughter’s rectangular legs.

It isn’t fair but she persists. Mum thinks she’s a director of a stop-motion animation feature

by a Czech surrealist. Mum is building fakes. Daughter sings the right anthems

in commemoration. Like out of a trout’s mouth aboard a plaque inscribed,

“For the Missus”. A day spa. A trout farm. A Czech Republic. A singer.

A water-bound rickshaw.