Ghosts in the Sunlight

I am almost never there, in these
old photographs: a hand
or shoulder, out of focus; a figure
in the background,
stepping from the frame.
I see myself, sometimes, in the restless
blur of a child, that flinch
in the eye, or the way
sun leaks its gold into the print;
or there, in that long white gash
across the face of the glass
on the wall behind. That
smear of light
the sign of me, leaving.

--Robin Robertson.

The light, predictable, as words, as the way your heart snags on the same emotion. You typed in 'wrecking light' and found the same music. Chances are: 5 million to one, and falling (Douglas Adams, in case). Type in 'wrecked light' and you find ghosts. 1976: the special time when time stopped. Time, the specialist in the division of roles.

Life in the high room, the windows and your thoughts at an angle to the world. From this distance everything is slightly less real. The W14 on its last round, its bright interior word in stark contrast to the surrounding dark, sunken fields, like a ship on the high seas. Up there, a few metres closer to the stars than anyone else, ahead of the weather, some glimpse of an ordered world, the distant thunder in the clouds, the mind on the outer rim of a clear intuition, the way a horse second guesses the darkness by sound, or the way the introductory moves in a game of chess foretell the endgame.

A Bank holiday in a house full of children..I see myself now as I was then. An image that is the breathing of time. The greater the distances grow, the closer one gets to something else.

Let us have winter loving
that the heart may be in peace