{"id":586,"date":"2010-03-15T14:30:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T14:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=586"},"modified":"2012-03-31T13:16:30","modified_gmt":"2012-03-31T13:16:30","slug":"padrika-tarrant-watches-eternity-with-the-fishes-in-the-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/padrika-tarrant-watches-eternity-with-the-fishes-in-the-sky\/","title":{"rendered":"Padrika Tarrant watches eternity with the fishes in the sky"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here, everything is still floating<\/span><\/p>\n

Within the foursquare edges of our world we hang, like flies in a web: now trembling, now resigned; then shuddering again, sudden as a broken leg.\u00a0 One might consider us without purpose, but do not misunderstand; our inertia has made us immortal.\u00a0 We save ourselves like vials of lovely poison, all claret colours and rarity, gorgeous as ruby when held against the light.<\/span>
\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0And so we look, from horizon to empty-brained horizon for instructions, for some neat key to make us decipher this life.\u00a0 Anything would do, like the picture on the jigsaw lid that unjumbles the jumble of the pieces.\u00a0 We are cats curled up in a basket of knitting, we might say, or there again, Look, we are the waves of the sea and a ship is sinking among us to its new drowned bed.\u00a0 We would know, for certain; we would know and would adjust ourselves accordingly.<\/span>
\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0So we sit out eternity with our cooking-stoves and our ill-lit parlours, rocking to and fro in the skinless light, tapping with our fingers the piano-key exercises that we half-learnt long ago.\u00a0 We read the newspaper every day; by now the writing is smudged to abstraction, grey ghostish letters on ghostish grey paper.\u00a0 It is no painful task to read it, not anymore; for the news is not legible, however catastrophic.\u00a0 We do not care to sully our heads with the idiot monsters of childhood.\u00a0 Indeed, our smiles and our lightbulbs are so interchangeable that there is no darkness left in the world, just shadows; only shadows.\u00a0 We gaze at one another like Buddhas, and we nod. <\/span>
\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0We float like fishes in the sky, you and I, like some ancient party balloon, sepia breeding in our brains.\u00a0 We are useful for nothing, figurines on a mantelpiece, lifeless and deathless both.\u00a0 Our entrails are slowing, ready for repainting, for the anatomist to count our bones, to lay them apart with his tender knife.\u00a0 Our eyes, already lidless, are drying in the airless air.<\/span>
\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Listen to the clock\u2019s elderly ticktick; hear your moments sheared off one by one.\u00a0 They clutter the narrow landing; they make the carpet musty and they thicken reality like gelatine does.\u00a0 Eke out your death with us, my dear, among the tea things and the plates.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\n* Padrika Tarrant <\/span>is a scissor-fixated sculpture graduate with a beautiful daughter and a stuffed bat in a frame.\u00a0 Her debut book was a collection of short stories called Broken things<\/span>; her second, a novel, will emerge in the spring.<\/p>\n

Here, everything is still floating<\/span> is the title of a 1920 collage by Max Ernst.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here, everything is still floating Within the foursquare edges of our world we hang, like flies in a web: now trembling, now resigned; then shuddering again, sudden as a broken leg.\u00a0 One might consider us without purpose, but do not misunderstand; our inertia has made us immortal.\u00a0 We save ourselves like vials of lovely poison, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1932,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586\/revisions\/1932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}