For

For the people I'll never know, the places I'll never see, the lives I'll never live...

I, like a river ,

Have been turned aside by this harsh age.

I am a substitute.

My life has flowed into another channel

And I do not recognize my shores.

O, how many fine sights I have missed,

How many curtains have risen without me

And fallen too.

How many of my friends

I have not met even once in my life,

How many city skylines

Could have drawn tears from my eyes.

---Anna.

A sight for sore eyes

"Guess what"

"What?"

"I saw a fox!!"

"Are you sure it wasn't a dog?"

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Oh, what does it matter. I saw it. I did. Off Snakes Lane East, just on Glastonbury Avenue. She crossed my path or I crossed hers. But useless to talk of "mine" or "hers" since when it comes to paths there are only rights of way, sidestepping or an aporia. There she was, slinking her way through suburbia, dinking her way past the debris of human lives gone awry, past the boarded fences of the Russians, who always sat in their concrete backyard, bare-chested, drinking heavily and fondly remembering frozen homelands. And then a swift turn, a scampering back to the darkness-as if to say: I can only take so much human light. Through a hole in the fence, to the open fields. And gone.

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But that was many years ago now. Every time I pass that corner I stop in my tracks and point to that exact place. There! Her absence as strangely real as her fleeting presence. In that space I still see the contours of the fox, like the impression of a footprint in the snow reminds one of someone long after they've gone. As was shown in 'The Time Machine': even though you can't see or touch some things they're still there, it's just that they exist in another dimension-and that dimension is called time. Grown-ups have such difficulty in accepting what lies beyond their own limited vision. We die from a lack of imagination. Even though so many weird and wondrous things drift past us all the time, would we but notice them.

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Well, what do you know! There she was, after all these years, at the train station. I was going to call out to her but didn't. But she didn't even look up and probably didn't remember me. Just turned up her snooty nose and walked away with that quick pitter-patter of hers, as silently and nonchalantly as ever. Ha! Such is the way of foxes. It's in their nature...

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I stood there agape. How difficult it is to say 'we' today. But as she turned with that wonderful red coat of hers I did hear her say: "Don't you know, foxes can't be tamed!"

Beginning's End

When I left last time I scrambled for the right words, and stumbled across a book of poetry. Repeating the rituals, the ceremony of loss. A storm starting up, clouds gathering the light to themselves,rain entering the world, diagonally. Waiting to fall...if it started with a word then it could end this way as well; to find a turn of phrase that I could twist my tongue around, not understanding it but enjoying its bitter taste. So that when the storm is over and all things are done flashing it will grow and rise to the surface. And then I shall speak it.


I grasp the possible
rightness of certain things
that possess the imagination, however briefly;
the verdict of their patterned randomness.

~~

..and the great wanderers like the albatross;
the ocean, ranging-in, laying itself
down on our alien shore.

~~

The end (again). It's beginning again. I find the ascribed place, the allotted time, scribbling frenetically, crazed, no longer mesmerized by darkness. Furiously, as if sparks might fly from ancient flint, the hand willing the quickening of the mind.

The good walk in step. Without knowing
anything of them. The others dance around them,
dancing the dances of the age.

~~

The tragedy of things is not conclusive;
rather, one way by which the spirit moves.

~~

Weight of the world, weight of the word, is
Take it slowly, like walking
through convalescence, the load
bearing not yet adjusted , progress
made with a slight forward tilt.

~~

Indebtedness is resolved by paying debts

~~

Scouring the text. Speed and lightness dissolving inherited meanings. You know in your heart of hearts that if you look for something, someone, they will not appear. This word. It must be here, in this book. But everything is in the approach. Like a junkie, what you're looking for is a quick fix which means it will not end. (25 minutes to go). Your eye zeroes in on something. The cold certainty of the doorknob...

Found it! The Time Machine. What else?!

If the sleep mask is a time machine
a world attends as under a strange star,
our gifts are what we owe, each to the other,
and which we give: now there's no going
back-the true fiction
set in the one frame; or the book set down
marked at that page, not closed, and not
returned to.

The Land of the Black Sun

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~He entered the black landscape, frightened and alone in the world, his shadow on the snow, not sure if these were his tears or his dreams. Only in the darkness could one find oneself, trace those footprints that led nowhere but back, back to the beginning, north of time's revolutions. Tumbling, tumbling down, until he came to a stop. And there he glimpsed something, a lonelier thing he could not imagine. He spied a small bird, blackness gleaming off its coat, hopping about amongst the tree roots, almost lost in the deep shadows of the forest. He thought to himself: some hearts beat so faintly that not even a god would hear them sigh.

~

Black be your heart,

slow-burning coal.

Black your button eyes

that are nothing but lies.

Blackly, sickly blindly promising a death.

You said.

Black your star on a bleak winter's day

Black was your voice (so your mother says)

Your wit, your bile, your humour, your style-

All this was Black, and Black and Black.

Sun darkened, memory blackened

Blackness admitted, to it you're commited

You said.

Black was my blood that thickens and clots

Black were my thoughts that decay and rots.

Black was the raven that sat by my heart

Black were her claws that tore me apart.