Journal scraps. January-February 2012

Friday night at the picnic table, wood smoke, crescent moon, candle under hurricane glass. All I’ve seen of Nairobi as I walk in the red dust is tips of trees in the sun and exhaust pipes and sun glinting off the memsahib’s tennis bracelet as she steers her big SUV. And cracked pleather matatu seats, shredded foam and metal, hard sun on broken glass embedded in garden walls. And 6 Kenyan ridgebacks, gold and copper dogs, the blue and red wool blanket in my single berth where I dream of a home and a small fleeting peace, a tiny white flag to wave, to declare a truce of calm and silence. The dreams continue: glass boats, birds that carry their nests in their beaks.

I’m staying near the Arboretum, the room is high in the trees, and every morning at 5h30 I awake to a clamour of birds. They scream. With a caw that is harsh and fierce, the ibises call to each other across dimensions of time and space, puncturing my dream, until they stop, abrupt, all at once. The silence fills in the cracks in the sound barrier. The first night here, the room filled with mosquitoes dangling in the air. They kept me tethered to the waking world, but now I’m using a pyrethrum flame and they line the windowsill, feet up. The light across the bed is sharp and white. If you were here, you’d hear the wood saws, distant hammers, as Nairobi expands and construction fills in every possible green space. You’d see the shaky concrete structures of future apartments. Since I arrived 2 months ago it has been hot and dry and I walk for hours in the red dust, though the long rains are coming.

I want to take my eyes out and lick them, taste what they’ve seen.

I don’t miss Paris but I do miss walking alone at night and feeling perfectly safe. I miss the twilight that would stretch out for hours and the city would go liquid, sun on every wall, a Dali painting. October in Paris, the air crispens,

wood smoke smudges the sky of the damp, grey city: her rose-lit windows, high ceilings, scarves and green winter parks. Here in Kenya the sky closes all at once like a shade being drawn.

I wake up chewing the air.

You see the dream in front of you as you live it/autumn/heart over fire.