I know it’s not Mother or you would have telegraphed.

Veda x

† † †

25 JULY 1970

I think I have to write to you differently now, Tilde.

Because I don’t get a response from you anymore.

And as no one cares cares cares I will speak of my despairs.

Oh, I’m sick of poetry. So fussy. Always asking to be cleaned up.

And prose: prose is full of nicety. Nice things are the only things that ought to be said in a letter, our mother advised.

Ask after the weather. Describe the view from your window.

That was the very essay topic prescribed at school all those years ago: Describe the view from your window.

Hundreds of years of women staring out of windows, describing views, imagining things on the horizon.

What did I spy with my little eye: peonies, hollyhocks; in the distance, gums. Ghost gums shimmering in the summer heat.

I must’ve dealt out poetry of some kind to impress the examination markers. Cleversticks old me.

Visited the Egyptian museum, went up and down a promenade in a big city.

Teeny weeny me on the head of a pin!

Oh the things they did and didn’t teach.

No, prose and poetry are done and dusted.

So I will write to you in a spool

Neither script

nor screed,

a spool I imagine as

long

and ongoing

and unbroken.

More like a cotton reel than a scroll.

An endless unwinding of something

very

very

easy to break

I can unravel in a spool, the process is endless.

(So much thread in one standard reel!)

I will unspool my self, it feels a very

cathartic process.

I will hang my anger out to dry,

another white among the whites

(or grey among the greys

as the case may be).

The house is quiet, Tilde.

Tick-ticking. Plock-plocking of a tap somewhere.

A smell comes over, goes, returns,

something cooked and forgotten.

Soiled washing.

A child will bang a door soon,

A husband will tiptoe through the flotsam jetsam.

I am at sea on a large

beached

lounge suite

in the centre of nothing

† † †

31 JULY 1970

Tilde

I have been feeling mildly fascist all day.

I wanted to kill the postman.

I wanted to eliminate the unignitable gas jets in the kitchen,

the slippery green shoes that don’t properly connect with the floor,

the hot and cold heater that doesn’t obey.

There are wheels of dust in the house.

Actual tumbleweeds. Matted loops of dust and dog hair.

You just leave a house to stew and it creates hours of labour.

Years.

Sleep on a bed and the sheets go grey.

Cease movement and voila! A carapace of dust.

Everything makes me want to scream.

Had a dream in which Owen is making soup. I pour in the boiling water only to discover it is coffee. I find Owen has put tea leaves in it too. We try and salvage several floating olives.

So hard

To pin down