BREATHING SPACE

Only one sentence I come across will do. Sticks. Holds, and holds me.

Make sure you stock up on

compassion. 

The rest of it; the silence, has to be translated only in photos from

a part of our home. Worn, white polka dot wallpaper that someone else

chose once (and, I realise seeing it like this, in pale and white, - a colour scheme

that is in interlude too), a winter that doesn't want to invite spring yet,

and a boy that doesn't understand the word virus as I try to

put it into words why everyone is staying at home so much, us too.

Make sure you stock up on
compassion.

∞
earthly matters | cassius's bed, bedding and canopy
are all from bonét et bonét, his hula-hoop was seasonally arranged
by the lovely emma of thistle by nature - flower delivery by bike in all
kinds of weather - for us, and the shell pillows are by
wonder woman tamar mogendorff

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WHAT I REMEMBER

I ask myself what will they remember when I am gone 

or when they are grown and cradling the hurts of their own childhood.

I wonder which pieces of this magnificent, messy effort will be worthy of recall

and which will fall by the wayside, detritus of days lived in the sunset

colours of our love for them. I know that much, if not most, will be packed away

in the recesses of what I hope they think of as a happy childhood.

Will moving be one of the sharp shards they carry gingerly? Angrily?

Perhaps tenderly? Will they demand explanation and reasons

for the wanderings of my heart? Will I have any?

- Hillary Bowen, A Home

This piece of writing rings in me as his laughter echoes between the pavilions.
I don't remember learning to ride a bicycle. As I think of it now, I can't
remember cycling at all as a child, even if of course I know I did.
To me much, if not most, is packed away in recesses of what I think of as a,
if not happy, then beautiful, - childhood.

What I remember is my mother's stunning feet. Bronzed and
glittering between the water's surface and the jetty, they were
my benchmark in the lake where I learnt how to swim.
The one which held sway to blood-red water lilies and pappa's
tortoiseshell glasses forever lost from a rowing boat.

What I remember is the light over the lake.

What I remember is pappa angling over me, blotting out the light,
where I lay on the asphalt after having fallen backwards from a truck.
I remember how he lifted me up and carried me laying over and in his arms,
up to the still empty apartment, where we were helping a friend move in.
I remember my body against the aged parquet flooring and that I felt,
just the way it used to look like it felt when a contused cartoon character
developed as if a halo of chirping birds and flickering stars
circling in a delirious dance around their head.

I don't remember us ever visiting that flat again.

I remember it as the summer I then spent laying under white sheets
hung like a veillike nordic bedouin tent between the appletrees, resting after
my cyclopean concussion. What I remember is the tree's shadows caressing
the linen, how they arched over me like nurses on guard.

What I remember is the gargantuan Giant Hogweeds skirting the railway.
I remember their flowers being so alluringly airy, in dainty white
against the gloomy dark tracks. And I remember them standing there
seductively; dressed in mamma and pappa's premonitions.
'Bear hogweed'. Poison. Burns.

I don't remember any cautions about the trains
that roared passed there through our parts of the woods.
Every Giant Hogweed was a storm bird, a rumble in themselves.

It was the time when we lived in that vast
turn of the century house with a round, budding tower room and
almost too many other rooms to hide in; to disappear in.
The ageing beauty had several staircases, with dark wooden bannisters
worn to soft perfection by the hands and the years moving by,
much too tempting to resist straddling and sliding down.

Once, there was a large brown bear rug with a mounted head,
thrown sprawling in an open skip in the neighbour's driveway.
Its jaws were open in a now forever soundless growl and its eyes
blind by glass. We saw it from where we were laying on our bellies,
up on our sun-warmed garage roof eating sticky plums
scattered there with us from nearby branches.
'Bear Hogweed'. Damnation. Brownbear.

I remember it as an instantaneous sensation,
invisible but dense and my very first, - suspicion that man is
more dangerous than any speeding train or toxic flower.

What is it that you remember..?









∞
cassius's first bicycle is from banwood
(i wonder if he'll remember learning to ride a bike.)

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THE MOON TAROT

'The harmony of change shows you that opposites

can alternate without clashing.

Resistance will only prolong your healing and growth.

Allow the duality of life to unfold and cycle through.'


I almost skim past the words but hesitate.
Harmony..? My change feels more like disharmony.
My mood is unsettled and sombre.
I feel restless & listless at the very same time.
Perhaps contradictions can sway without discord.
I like to think so. But Harmony. Her, this I thought of
only last night, I've forgotten the face of.

I've put the large noise-cancelling headphones on.
I must get to think my thoughts to their end on my own.
The cushions are made of nougat coloured leather, finally worn
soft by momentarily needing to expel the everyday murmurs.
Now they play Gustavo Santaolalla on high volume straight into me,
and I am propelled back to my Blueberry Nights.
Tears pulse down my cheeks. Stops at corners of the mouth and
abandoned arms, as a ray of sunlight vehemently insists on
blinding me through cleavage in the curtain.
I've just cursed it, and that in itself strike me.

To curse a ray of light. Let go, Hannah.

Resistance will only prolong your healing and growth.

Allow the duality of life to unfold and cycle through.'

∞

the moon tarot was read here

work for our Lemholt N' Bergman (part of LINES)
self-portrait with hand-drawn lines by Bergman

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GROWING PAINS

"Some periods of our growth are so confusing

that we don't even recognize that growth is happening...

Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting,

holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be,

eventually become the periods we wait for,

for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared

for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability,

a new level of the personality is about to be revealed."

- 'Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987'

by Alice Walker

I've got growing pains. Silence and growing pains.

Or I brace myself with that's what I've got because it agrees so altogether

with the words of one of my household gods, Alice Walker. 

I think it like a prayer, that this time that feels so confusing

in effect is a time of growth disguised. Please let it be so.

It is his little body growing suddenly so fast it feels like we

should be able to hear it, but for him, everything is barefaced yet. 

It is me who aches and have one thousand and one nights of questions.

It is me who folds corners in one book after the other about being a

mother and craving to write, and every other one about being a

woman and taking up space. The late evenings are mine.

And the words. The words of the others. And those within that

swell me so, but refuses to come to the surface so

that I can look them in the eye.

One morning when we lay slumbery and study each other he says I

smell like butterfly milk. I write that down a bit later in a 'Cassius Says' notebook,

mark the date next to it. I think to myself then that I've become too much library

and too little poetry, too much laundry basket and too little nudity,

too much stain remover and too little dance moves.

Then I think I'm always so quick to be hard on myself.

And I think that I know this place and I've been here before, only at

another age. Been in growth or in waiting at least,

and instead felt like if utterly lost.

This is a reminder that even if I am uncertain of the future I'll want to be

more poetry (it'll have to be whatever it is) and nude more often.

There's a generous mirror that was left to hang in this flat from the

previous inhabitant. Every now and then when I'm home alone I drag

Cassius's clothes rail away from in front of it, let my dressing gown fall

to the floor and stand there naked, downright and without demeanour.

I can think to myself then, nowadays, that it is beautiful how it

has changed. The belly that has a softer roundness after carrying him,

the breasts that have more density in their drops, my shoulders and

the collarbone that bridge them that's always been strong.  

I push them back then and stand straight. In the light.

And I can think to myself now when I put this into words, that

right there is something that has come to the surface to look me in the eye.

That the writer, the woman, and the lover in me doesn't have to

be dormant in the mother's shadow. I am right here.

∞

kids malawi chair from this beautiful place
linen shell pillow by tamar mogendorff
large muslin swaddle from bonét et bonét
| selfportrait |
cassius is wearing linen trousers from mingo kids
toy furniture for pretend friends by stuül

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THEN, WHAT DO YOU DREAM OF?

Inside of the condensed darkness when the others have fallen asleep is when I think the best.

That's when the words come to me in clarity and complete form. Torrential, thorough.

So, if this, for now, is my Room of One's Own I arrange, anew, the little table on my side

of the bed, as that morning's first tea cools. I stack books & notebooks and place a

candle close; a flame for the night, draw an unstudied loop from faint scrape to firm dark

that assures the pen is spirited. I leaf through the pages of the most beautiful of the notebooks,

the linen-covered hefty one that I believe to be empty but for 500 pages waiting.

Only then do I see it's got dark plum purple batik-like stains overflowing

its edges and on the flyleaf, it's written in graphite

Cassius Lemholt Violaris 
gave birth to this book on 11 / 05 / 19
by spilling red wine all over mamma's book.

The wine delicious.
The flavour of the mood bitter.

Papa
x


p.s 


the Candy Boxing Monkey Saga

Cassius - But you're a toy..!
Monkey a.k.a Papa - Yes. But I have a life.
Cassius - Oh. Okey. Then, what do you dream of..?

You know how you know the handwriting of a loved one.
(His letters have the softest edges but follow no rules of capital or lowercase.)
I hold the book, weigh it. I think of how different our together is now.
How we've also deepened into each other, us two. Somewhere among the days
since him, we've become accomplices in the unspoken,
- the sensuality in the gaps when he's asleep, to make love there;
the glances of fear when he's hurt himself, and we're yet to know how badly;
the poorly disguised pleasure of huddling in the bathtub that really is too small for three bodies;
 the significance of the hand stretched out to hold the other's under the covers
when he has entrenched himself in the middle and in between;
the smiling eyes that meet at the sidewalk when he yells
Thank You..! Byeeee..! to yet another bus driver;
the pure joy when he answers that his favourite day of the nursery week
is the one where they go visit the old people in the nursing home down the street;
how the other's voice drops and descends, to disappear like honey
into the night alongside Winnie the Pooh.

And you know how you know when you've found the core.
How you can almost touch an insight once it's finally landed in you.
How obvious it suddenly is.
It's here I have to start. It's because of this I have to start over.
This is where my new narrative comes into existence.
I'm going to fill the most beautiful notebook.






∞

monkey in its own kimono
she delivers flowers by bike in our city
chocolate-coloured cashmere

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PRESENCE AND SILENCE HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER

'I've been thinking about something for a long time,

and I keep noticing that most human speech - if not all human speech -

is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about

presence and absence. When we breathe in, our bodies are

filled with nutrients and nourishment. 

Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush;

our bones get harder, they get compacted. Our muscles get

toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in.

The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak.

So presence and silence have something to do with each other.'

/ Li-Young Lee

I'm here, even if one might not think so.
Somehow I am always writing, even when I am not.
I buy pencils and a long, sand-coloured silk nightdress that
I never even try on. The silkiness is smoother suspended from
a hanger on the wardrobe door and I can't reject what is
never written down.

I read instead, others that get the words right, inside of books.
I observe instead, others that look beautiful in silk, in posted photos.
And I think to myself that that's more than a little bit sad.
That it is as if I'm holding my breath. I neither breathe out
kind of with purpose nor take breaths in deep enough.
I think to myself that I want to take up space, in my way, like me.
I want to tell the poet that in fact there is a word, one that
we sometimes say in a surely singular way in Swedish,
at the very same time as we breathe in.

YES.

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