"Spring Hill Fair " (1984)
It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect sadness
to confine itself to it's causes. Like a river in flood,
when it subsides and the drowned bodies of
animals have been deposited in the treetops, there is
another kind of damage that takes place beyond the torrent.
At first, it seemed as though she had only left
the room to go into the garden and had been delayed by stray
chickens in the corn. Then he had thought she might
have eloped with the rodeo-boy from the neighbouring
property but it wasn't till one afternoon, when he
had heard guitar playing coming from her room and
had rushed upstairs to confront her and had seen
that it was only the wind in the curtains brushing
against the open strings, that he finally knew she
wasn't coming back. He had dealt with the deluge alright
but the watermark of her leaving was still quite visible.
He had resorted to the compass then, thinking that
geography might rescue him but after one week in the
Victorian Alps he came back north, realising that snow which
he had never seen before, was only frozen water.
I'll take you to Hollywood
I'll take you to Mexico
I'll take you anywhere the
River of Money flows.
I'll take you to Hollywood
I'll take you to Mexico
I'll take you anywhere the
River of Money flows.
But was it really possible for him to cope with the
magnitude of her absence? The snow had failed him.
Bottles had almost emptied themselves without effect.
The television, a samaritan during other tribulations, had
been repossessed. She had left her travelling clock
though thinking it incapable of funcitioning in
another time-zone; so the long vacant days of expensive sunlight
were filled with the sound of her minutes, with the measuring of
her hours.
