Walking around the bay

Written to a prompt of "write something about Cardiff in 5 minutes" at the Cardiff bay writing group meetup last night.

So narrow, the world, recently
Head travels only, thinking
overthinking maybe,
the steps to get to the water

The submerged grid of pebbles outside the flat, blind mans crossing
The herringbone brick pavement with its dips and slants, leading
around the corner, down the street

The bilingual sign posts many ways, mermaids and hamadryads here

Resting on red ironwork, hearing the snick-whoosh of cars
speeding up to the bridge

My leg anchoring me but mind travelling on
across to the Taff

Tomorrow, maybe, to walk that far
to watch the swans, white holes in the pewter glitter
bending their necks at the flightless bird.

fading places

Mostly on business trips, I get to see the inside of a hotel room and the inside of a range of factories. This last week I went to Israel, one of those places that had never been on my "must see" list, and I wasn't really looking forward to it all that much, mostly because of the high temperatures. We arrived as it got dark on Sunday evening, in the speeded up way that dusk falls in countries nearer to the equator, when I am used to the long northern European evenings. 

There were five of us travelling together, including one of my best friends, and we managed to have some time to make a couple of evening trips, firstly to Jerusalem (more of which later), and secondly to the Dead Sea. I read this weekend that unless millions of gallons of water are pumped into the sea, it will disappear in the next 50 years. We drove through hilly desert to get to the sea at Neve Zohar, the colours in the desert ranging from double cream to butterscotch, to burnt meringue... (yes, I was hungry as we drove through there)

As we got near, signs at the road's edge indicated how close we were to sea level, and then we dipped below, and still the sea lay far below that. It was striated with barriers, banks, build ups of salt and sand, looking more like the edges of Holland, where the sea is enclosed in order to drain it for land. I'm not sure why the banks are here, I assume they are emerging naturally as a result of the continual evaporation. As we got to the water we could see the salt crusts bulging out of the water, the banking process starting up in miniature. The sun was setting behind the desert hills, and opposite, the "coast" of Jordan was rinsed in an appropriately rosy light.

The salt lines meandered across the water, astonishingly turquoise where there were deeper pools. Dividing and fractal, they fingered they way under the surface, poking through in places and segregating the sea into lakes, pools. The skin of the earth pushing out the natal fluid. Grasses at the edge of the sea turn into crusty coral polyps. The landscape is fading away.

intemperate

I love the cool feel of this New Orleans doorstep, captured on a day where the temperature and humidity were high enough (and the exercise of ambling around strenuous enough) to send rivulets of sweat down my back and into my waistband.
A handful of weeks later, back at home, today the temperature is not forecast to go above freezing point, suitable for wrapping up in scarf and gloves and visiting the first day of the Weihnachtsmarkt and the first Glühwein of the year.  Outside the leaves are limp, those on the bushes with cold, and those on the ground sodden with yesterdays snow.  My Aran jumper, knitted twenty years before as a student in Bradford, is fished out of the cupboard in honour of the start of Winter with a capital 'W'.
The underfloor heating, turned up in my bathroom, bathes my toes after the shower.  Like walking on a beach under the evening sun.  But it is not so easy to imagine myself there, I cup my hands around the coffee and wait for the sun to come up.