Explaining Tropic.

I got the horrors pretty badly last Friday night. I was in the process of putting my son to bed at the time, having just got our daughter off to sleep. We were sitting in the rocking chair beneath his window, looking up at the sky and pointing out things like clouds and aeroplanes and a watery sliver of new moon. Meanwhile, in the back of my mind, where my grown-up thoughts process themselves while I’m looking after the kids, I was wondering how life had brought me here. Not a bad place to be, certainly, but not a foreseen place, either, not a place consciously and assiduously dreamt of.

What is this place I’m referring to, exactly? I suppose I mean being a parent in a far-away country where we fall uncomfortably between the socio-economic gaps; a place in which we’re neither poor enough to ignore certain deficiencies in our lifestyle because they’re impossibly out of reach, nor rich enough to fulfill the assumed perquisites of our 'class' (such as a car to deal with this insane city, or a little help with looking after the kids so I could get on with my work, etc.); a place where I’ve become the de facto prime carer for our children while my wife has to go out to work at the job which brought us out to Brazil; a place where I have discovered more love and emotional fulfilment than I ever dreamed of, but which has also cataclysmically buggered up all my carefully laid plans and long- (morbidly long-) harboured ambitions.

At the same time, I was worrying in that strange, overlapping way about my children and myself, about how to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable gulf between their innocence and magical dominion over the universe with my own dwindling handful of certainties, my sorry quantity of love, my overshadowed strength, all of which stems from an awareness of advancing, inexorable age and then, as Larkin puts it, the end of age. I was overwhelmed by the hopelessness of it, by the desire to rescue them from all that suffering, and to try and save something from my own pretty sorry existence (I’m not being self-pitying – I think all our existences are pretty sorry when it comes down to it) to make sense of it all.

All of which sounds very reasonable and halfway decent. But at the same I was also fighting off less rational fears, the negative thought patterns and endless looping spirals of anxiety that I suffer from. I felt like screaming for it to stop, and it was an effort to keep my shit together whilst I finished off my son’s night-time routine of stories and songs. In the gardens below us, I could hear the kids racing around chasing each other and yelling; it was a lonely sort of sound, the cries of unseen children echoing up from concrete walls. Meanwhile, I could see other people in the lighted windows opposite – a couple sitting down to dinner, a little girl playing with the Christmas lights her mum had strung up over the window and, there, lastly, an old woman in pyjamas standing at the window, looking back at me.

I should perhaps have mentioned earlier that it is punishingly hot here right now, around thirty to thirty-five degrees all day, everyday, with no respite at night, no breeze, no rain or the customary summer storms that break the heat. Most people spend their days in shorts and flip-flops, and when you get home, you strip down to whatever you can get away with. But there was this woman looking out at me, in her pyjamas, and it seemed to me that she was as trapped and lost as I was. And I guess that was the seed for this poem, ‘Tropic’.

I managed to get my son safely to bed and I went and got my notebook and pen, wondering if anything would come of this restless mood, this germ of thought. I scribbled away for a while, but none of it made sense. And then I thought, fuck it, don’t try and explain why you feel this way – just write the feeling, and write it through your description of this view from the window, that woman, this strange dizzying sense of night falling and lives going on around you while you fight on in this locked-in despair. So I did. I eschewed all the obvious pastoral metaphors that would unpack the idea; I wrote it dark and angry and elliptical. I didn’t explain why the children were screaming (because they were playing), or that the lighted cubes were windows, or why the sunset resembled a chemical spill (pollution makes for spectacular sunsets), or how exactly the streets could resemble stunned animals waiting to be slaughtered. I let all the epistemological weight rest on that pay-off of the old woman standing at the window confronting her mortality, and raging against it and the world beyond her window was participating in the story of life and youth and all the things denied to her.

Next I had to find a suitable title. My first thought was crap, December in São Paulo. Then I thought of simply using the day’s date, making it more cryptic. That was crap, too. Then I thought of being all Da Vinci Code, writing down the coordinates for São Paulo and ending it with the date, so that people could work out for themselves why it was hot in December and why the environment was so dystopian (São Paulo is the ultimate concrete jungle, after all). But, while I liked that, it seemed too obfuscatory. So I started thinking about the tropics, and then I looked up to see which Tropic we’re in – and it’s Capricorn, and the meridian actually passes through São Paulo State, which seemed like a happy coincidence, as did the fact that the astrological sign of Capricorn falls in December. But Tropic of Capricorn is a shit title, so I decided just to call it Tropic.

Frankly, it’s a nasty little thing, but somehow writing it like that got me out of that place – and isn’t that why we create things in the first place?

Tropic

The streets recede like
stunned animals on hooks

The frozen chemical spill
of sunset fades

The children’s screams echo
between lighted cubes

And an old woman in pyjamas
rages at blood too thin

To feel the heat again.