Rebecca Dempsey
Touch
Hands on my back. Elbows and fingers spread
kneading into muscle. External pressure measures
distances between bright points of heat/ache in hips, shoulders,
tracking nodes along my spine. I feel small, in a way I seldom do.
Hand spans between bones, rhythmic contact to inflamed sites.
Tension builds and bruises. Hurt blooms deep, and eases,
stretches over time. Breathes expand, contract
at each new touch. Taut. Out of joint. Bury me, I want to say.
Gather me up. Bury these bones
at the base of a mountain so, I can shrink.
Or, I can remain this size. In the mountain’s shadow
I’ll shelter. I’ll be still. I’ll recover. I’ll breathe.
Tendering my flesh, at the foothills. I’ll be.
Ceding myself to the earth, embraced until there’s nothing left.
Bury me so I am warm, and beyond distress.
Terra rosa
Secateurs and sunscreen.
Bent beneath dry vines,
severing new growth to direct the force that through green fuses
drives future grapes to more richly ripen.
It’s called shoot thinning but no matter.
Some nights, the summer I worked in the vineyard returns unbidden.
Dozing in vehicles, radio quiet. Hat over my face.
Nothing in the sky but distant crop dusters.
Sounds of crickets and boots crunching dry weeds into baked earth.
Each night, sunk exhausted into bed, fevered images precluded rest.
In dreams, I never heard the dawn chorus magpies warbling.
Never felt the stones in my shoes.
Could not detect, as I slept, the roses planted at each row end.
Nor taste crushed cold green grapes bursting tangy on my tongue.
Could not feel the dappled light through breeze blown vine leaves
(as I reclined in their shade, too sore to move). No.
Asleep, I swallowed twisting vine runners, snaking up and through.
I grappled writhing branches around my limbs,
pinned by the appendages of some vast unseen creature,
determined on coiling suffocation. Through winding,
unbreakable tangles, come from underground,
suckers like veins sent to squeeze my blood back into the red earth,
crush my bones into the limestone for autumn’s vintage,
but too, too soon. My body, the lees,
a poor libation until the fruit weighs for harvest.
I wake choking, breath heavy, hands checking nothing’s lost to shears.
I wash my face, fingers swirling under vinous water
pumped from underground.
I wondered, then, if it was like muscle memory,
this force driving the young grapevine,
driving my dreams? Driving this destruction,
from rows of vines mechanically planted,
usurping ancient trees for some rich red table tipple
tasting of other fruits, foreign to this soil?
What terror did this labour awaken?
Replaying images from my sleep and work,
like racking the wine from one barrel to another,
I take the sediment with me. Have I mistaken oenology for oneirology?
I’ll never know, because I never returned to the terroir,
and never worked in the vineyard again.
Rebecca Dempsey is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia. After learning to read, aged nine, she wrote her first story aged 10. Called The Mystery Lights, her story was an epic tale inspired by a short story her mother wrote to submit to a women’s magazine writing competition. Neither story was published and both were subsequently lost to history. Rebecca can be found at WritingBec.com