The night winds up with the aftertaste of Tabasco at The Moon,an old haunt that has sustained itself through alternative grit & reinvention all the way back to my friends cherry picking days in the south. I am talking over fifteen years ago.The old sign outside is still the same excepting a white lit crack across the middle, no more than a nice scar fitted to its character. We are indulging a second wind, having spent a good part of the evening at Mr. Birds waiting for the saxophonist. The saxophonist played to standard: much resolved curvature in flight, more fruit ripening above the painted rain & attentively whittled thorns. But he is by no means still dawdling in our ears. We are quite gone with the whippoorwill now,done with the day. And though the saxophonist himself had traveled too far & wide to remember us it was good enough to see him in town again. We stayed for 4 songs & left at the end of a familiar tune. This is Fall isnt it?, my friend said. I listened a little more & nodded. Yes it is. He's doing a pretty good job. I said. Yes , he said. Well shall we? The song is in our ears as we walk into the outside light. Where next? my friend says. The Moon you think?, I say.
The air in The Moon is easier to breathe, the light dimmed agreeably in the red cushioned booth we have to ourselves right along the middle of the aisle. The place is in reasonable bustle & though everyone seems animated with their piece of pie we do not hear so much as a murmur over the recorded music playing into the warm air, not even from the occupied booths either side of us and gives the occassional sensation of viewing an experimental film in an old cinema. My friend is in the movie, the back of his head against the mirror. He is looking around, saying nothing just yet, his mood blithe, sardonic. He is chuckling over a photograph he has just taken of me, romantic enough in the glow of a wall lamp scattering off lined mirrors but at the same time I appear confounded & bloated like an old fish hooked through the gill. Then I do not know what it is I say or if he remembers something but we are back picking over the details of the days of the glittering wind as though it were a complex mechanical toy in disrepair we have not troubleshooted to mutual satisfaction. As always we are sure it ran without batteries. So as always we are trying to figure out what made it stop. We have, prior to this evening inspected the gears, both large-scale & miniscule & felt for left over traces of grease. We've tightened bolts & screws, coppered the threads, replaced springs, put reflective paint over the rust. The only thing left to do is attempt to identify the dedicated function of every wire we've found since we first took it out of its case. All this of course is in a manner of speaking. We are dealing with one of the most exotic things to refer to in casual note form: romantic illumination. But a simpler sense of things prevails. I order a pizza. My friend holds up a finger for a beer. I add a cup of flat white coffee & a lump of Italian chocolate. The waiter seems to like us & engages us in a small conversation about the funky tang of blue cheese on the pizza. When he goes we do not pick up where we left off. I get up & grab a bottle of Tabasco.
My friend has a nice place up in the hills. Lately he has taught his daughter, barely 2, to resist the poison berries in their wide rambling garden on instruction. This is no mean feat, making forbearance like this clear to a child, considering the lure of bright red berries in among the dark leaves & stark white flowers of the cotoneaster. They are numerous, easy to find, & sit pleasantly in the fingers, smear easily when dragged against concrete & roll willingly off the stairs. The place sits on just under an acre, the main abode backing against meadow & a small grove of eucalypts & paperbark. A small path winds through garden & lamps to a fortress-like old mechanics garage my friend is converting into a personal music hall & studio. Other than the fact that it faces the highway & lets too much sound through, it is perfectly sized & partitioned for his intentions. He has previously walked me around pointing matter of factly to where things will be. This is where the recording booth will be, I'll put a window right here,...the piano sits next to the Hammond across that wall. It is all easy to see. It is a project that will require much of everything. The bricks are now stacked up inside & out, sandwiching the glass paneled frame that used to be the garage door. My friend has wandered across the entire length of some eccentric's salvage yard two kilometers up the road & will bargain with him about the price of some wooden dragons he intends to ornament the hallways with. Though knowing he would appreciate a hand with the menial finicks about the place, I take my time preferring instead to call him out for the evening on a whimsy. My friend from Nagano has advised as much: Do not spend too many hours laboring with a friend, it discourages more pleasurable mysteries. And that is the way it goes.
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It is the morning after. I am having coffee on the porch steps beside the grass. The clouds over the rooftops are ridged in frail bending lines like the rippled surface of windblown sand. Like the becalmed shore too perhaps, of other, unspeakable thoughts. For a small while my thoughts revisit the days of the glittering wind, not just here but all the way to the Pacific. Not just out of reminiscence but because before sleeping I came across Lafcadio Hearn's description of the Tennoji temple in old Osaka which excellently mirrored the sensation of its memory:
" To know what Tennoji is, one must see the weirdness of its decay - the beautiful nuetral tones of its timbers, the fading spectral greys & yellows of wall-surfaces,the eccentricities of disjointing, the extraordinary carvings under eaves, - carvings of waves & clouds & dragons & demons, once splendid with lacquer & gold, now time whitened to the tint of smoke & looking as if about to curl away like smoke & vanish. "
It is not something I could have expressed better, even coincidentally. It is no longer something I deliberately think of & as such, though I have referred to it enough I have also left many things out. Whatever those days meant we have left in a matchbox in some transit station in our minds. But we still have each a matchstick left. Even last night sitting quietly beside the mirrors I saw it between our teeth. Even three months or so ago walking the streets of my childhood I scratched my ear with it.
Early in the afternoon my friend from Nagano sends me a text: Its sunset now. Nothing more. I do not even know if he is still in Nagano. Later in the car on the way to pick up some bread & apples,over the barrier railings of the freeway, I see the sunset arrive on the river. My 2 & a half year old daughter says it from her seat behind mine : The clouds are on fire.
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