snowy fields showing their bones to the rising moon

[caro-birch.livejournal.com]

December 22nd, heading towards an early dusk

Come up on the town three days before Christmas, and a thin snow's coming down, fine as salt and about as gritty in your eyes. It's not late in the day, but smoke's rising in ropes, and there are lights in the windows, smooth and steady and calm. Oh, it's real quiet, like I could call down and the whole town would look up and see me here on the edge of everything and looking down. Good place to be, that. In the border towns, at the water's meeting places, at the fringe of the woods. On the edge of things.

I've seen the carnival laid out down there. That lot's been beaten down by a year of feet. Grass growing round all the trailers, paths worn in the mud like sheep hollows, I can see it all from here. A carnival that don't move's no carnival at all, but I guess they've got their reasons, or else they're long gone, along the road or buried under it. I've seen these things. Think it's easy driving months in a painted trailer, small town to small town? The Wunderkammer, Cabinet of Wonders and Delights! Pearl of the Four Winds! There's a particular geometry to packing all those glass cases into a painted horse box. A person gets to know how things fit together, but one thing I don't know is how a carnival can fit with a town for months on end. Hard to tell which will like seeing me the least, but it don't turn me round.

Excolo opens up to me and I go on down into it. Ice is cradled thin and white at the banks of the river. I can't stop thinking of the little stove in my trailer, how it'll feel to fire it up and sit real close, smelling of hot pinewood and coffee... But I carry on over the bridge and park up in the grit where the road's wide.

And there it is. Carnaval Diabolique. Well, fuck me. Lay my hand on the flaking sign. Well, honey, you and me haven't run into each other for a long time, but you still got that feel to you, like something's molten under the midway grass. Not so rough as carnies can be, sure, but something else there too; that feeling of something looking back from the glass jars in the Wunderkammer, something seeing me all yellow with formaldehyde and curved with the glass, but nothing's moving. Like that.

Pull my scarf up higher and go kicking through the frozen grass to the living lot. Wonder if Syl's still chiding those girls of hers, and I'm thinking of a ghost town one summer years ago when the Four Winds set up along side of the Diabolique, and we stamped the grass down with dancing all night long.

[Open to Syl]

snowy fields showing their bones to the rising moon

[caro-birch.livejournal.com]

December 22nd, heading towards an early dusk

Come up on the town three days before Christmas, and a thin snow's coming down, fine as salt and about as gritty in your eyes. It's not late in the day, but smoke's rising in ropes, and there are lights in the windows, smooth and steady and calm. Oh, it's real quiet, like I could call down and the whole town would look up and see me here on the edge of everything and looking down. Good place to be, that. In the border towns, at the water's meeting places, at the fringe of the woods. On the edge of things.

I've seen the carnival laid out down there. That lot's been beaten down by a year of feet. Grass growing round all the trailers, paths worn in the mud like sheep hollows, I can see it all from here. A carnival that don't move's no carnival at all, but I guess they've got their reasons, or else they're long gone, along the road or buried under it. I've seen these things. Think it's easy driving months in a painted trailer, small town to small town? The Wunderkammer, Cabinet of Wonders and Delights! Pearl of the Four Winds! There's a particular geometry to packing all those glass cases into a painted horse box. A person gets to know how things fit together, but one thing I don't know is how a carnival can fit with a town for months on end. Hard to tell which will like seeing me the least, but it don't turn me round.

Excolo opens up to me and I go on down into it. Ice is cradled thin and white at the banks of the river. I can't stop thinking of the little stove in my trailer, how it'll feel to fire it up and sit real close, smelling of hot pinewood and coffee... But I carry on over the bridge and park up in the grit where the road's wide.

And there it is. Carnaval Diabolique. Well, fuck me. Lay my hand on the flaking sign. Well, honey, you and me haven't run into each other for a long time, but you still got that feel to you, like something's molten under the midway grass. Not so rough as carnies can be, sure, but something else there too; that feeling of something looking back from the glass jars in the Wunderkammer, something seeing me all yellow with formaldehyde and curved with the glass, but nothing's moving. Like that.

Pull my scarf up higher and go kicking through the frozen grass to the living lot. Wonder if Syl's still chiding those girls of hers, and I'm thinking of a ghost town one summer years ago when the Four Winds set up along side of the Diabolique, and we stamped the grass down with dancing all night long.

[Open to Syl]