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Sport 39: 2011
Theories and Figures
Theories and Figures
A relaxation tape tells me to shimmy my neck and face like a horse. I close my eyes and try to find my inner horse. He is coal black. Outside cars sluice over the road. The horse is loose: a wheeled wooden mare melts into a rodeo chestnut. Huh-ha like an accordion. I shuck my shoulders and try to be the idea of horse: a mane and downy nose, but I slide back into a rider and look up the slope between two tulip ears. He takes off with a glide and push. He steps into my idea of his idea of horse.
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The geographer teaches human geography: the bluff of a woman’s shoulder or a deposit of hair. He talks about the space between people. You’ll want to see the competition course map, he says. He is wearing a blonde wig and a cerise cardigan. It’s a good colour. He spreads the creased paper over the coffee table and shows me where we will stake the hills with flags and punches. I study the shape like an ink blot.
In the concrete gulf of the wildlife reserve we park the car. I hide slender orange flags in bushes and behind the corpses of trees. At the stream he explains conservation. It’s not what people think, he says as he leans on the bridge. Everything needs to change.
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A woman is sometimes the cartographer of her body. She shaves its slow limbs. Her cavities, a great idea, split into descendant branches. A geographer measures the way a bank shapes the water, which shapes the bank’s space. At the branch mouth the groin is a shore-protection structure, narrow in width but permeable (openings). His mother’s name becomes his first name.
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page 233His face is a closed atlas. ‘I never know what to use,’ I say as we drive into town. ‘Use either, dear. Either he or she,’ the geographer says.
‘Would you two ladies like to order lunch?’ asks the waitress.