Myrto or The Lemon Farm
The landscape shifts with the rushing coast, up and down instead of sideways, pulling those born in the sea, their ghosts and plots up from the water, rising as forms and limbs withering out of focus in the overcast light. Myrto feels the slow withdrawal from population, her body trailing the motion outside the windows of the car, her ribcage pocked with tiny pieces of glass in speed, away from the cut of water and sky, away from the shore as faces stream up the cliffs of Aley, through pine and cedar and arid white rock and red berried branches, tangling in their wake, trees and bodies split-open to their sunlit parts, the winter glare still warming the orchards. Set forward again into the flow of the road, to nowhere, into life, she coasts the curves of the valleys, the chasms of the wide gorge, the gleam from the vineyards and olive groves and rose gardens and orange trees burnt by arson and wildfires. She speeds up again, away from the base of the seashore. Passing fences made of cactus cloaked in thin skeletons, enclosing lone dog-breeders smoking hashish, depopulated village after depopulated village, where snipers boorishly spray-painted ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ once they had seized town halls and sodomised their administration and buried their dead, once they had poured tar over their boys’ wounds and filled graves with stolen honey and wine, then pressed on for more. Below the sea, crimson as the setting sun, sometimes like fire. Myrto stops before Saint Charbel in a central village fountain, jumps in fully-clothed while a crazed accountant wrapped in bedsheets rides past muttering softly to the heavens. She sees his eyes red with gin, his legs dangling off the side of the frame of his seatless bike, passing the busts of a sallow plaster Christ and a blue-robed porcelain Mary. Passing an arak distillery known to have been founded by wolves, she sees handsome men boil ox tongue and drink anise in the garden of a sandstone stable in an otherwise empty village. A white plastic chair flies across the yard as they each lunge to take possession of each other, to crash through each other, to spill out of each other, to outshine each other, as crude marauders not knowing how to express their love. They stop fighting and down more of the spirit beneath the disc of the falling sun. She sees them blend out of sight, above the smog and the press of the city now, into a horrible intelligence, a searching and violent hope, to find beauty among the wreckage. Passing wounds in different studies of light, scabbed on the vast walls of daughters, the world spins inside itself, as a liquid over the plains, over Holy Lands and sacrificial slabs, over citrus peel and sumac-stained hands, over raised sardine fishing boats built with the nails that crucify father to son. Passing a bust of the martyr Saint Barbara in the middle of the next village fountain. Passing the pain of a face. Torn lengths of muslin thread through the rocks grinding all the way down through the landscape, across the marbled cliffs and through the water, across the rainbowed surfaces that generate the depths of the ocean underground. Passing a village where the Saltanah of a Druze wedding song plays with horsehair string and goatskin drum in burned paddocks still sprouting wildflowers, pulsing a procession from the dry fields through the stone and mudbrick alleys of one family to the next. Passing a village where the Adhan plays through two plastic speakers from two minarets while a man takes an angle grinder and cleans the rims and hubcaps of one of the cars beside the mosque. The sparks dissipate with the prayers. ‘On the Brink’ talks the headline from the car radio before she switches it off to keep rising. She pulls over and cups handfuls of water to her wide mouth from a small spring and notices her clothes drying with the unseasonal heat. Rising she reaches the lemon farm towards the top of the mount, where a great-grandmother holding a frame says, “I’ve been waiting for you to give me a picture to put in here.” Yet the frame is housed in black glass. The voice sings the end of the road, beside ancient stones placed into columns into circles, beside a bright green tree sliced in three. Ghosts trade in her fleeting transaction, pass their hands through her body, her free breath of life, stuffing her pockets with dried fruits, passing on this house not made by hands, this seat in the Sun. Ink pours from the mounts and floods the clay valleys and savage streets and a currency of dreams flayed alive. They course through Myrto’s blue veins — sideways her body and shelter and passage — the dawn moves in her and the forest sings in her before she can get them all away. How long until the ruin is swallowed by the sea below? What can these pillars raise?
by Scott McCulloch
by Scott McCulloch
