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I pass a woman sitting quietly on the steps outside a door on a sun-drenched day. The white light has made a desert of this place, she thinks to herself as she ties and unties a plastic bag. She sits , hunched, wrapped in a quilt coat and looks and looks at the feet that pass her by. How many this hour...90..., 92, 93. She mumbles the word "velocity" to herself again and again. Is it because they move to a different speed, a different rhythym of life, that they cannot see her?

On the 275 a woman fumbles nervously for a gold coin in her pocket, looking for reassurance. She can feel herself entering the twighlight years of her life. Her intelligent face and her shock of grey hair is out of place in these parts. She is American, perhaps, or at least she has lived through the 60's there. In her purse , a copy of Blake's poems. Below her thin lips there is largeish red blotch, which remids me of a map. She brings her pointed fingers to her face so that no-one can read it.

Time's in her pocket, ticking loud
on a stalled hand

Birds in flight. Unmoved by the solid world below them. There is nothing to do but follow one's instincts like a mathematical rule. To live in a world that is completely one's own. The space between the wng tips of each bird and the distance between each flock display the variety of time-experience. The flow of time depends on one's perceptions, on one's existence. The whole world is a set of clocks wound to a different speed. We look at each landscape, each segment of life and reduce it down to our own, creating a timelss, static image of it.
---After E. Bishop.

The spluttering ring of blotches on the moon's surface: are these wells of black water, vast pools of dark, brackish,bitterness that allow the light to stream forth, unblemished? But when Man landed on the planet it was smaller than he thought and the grey dust that looked so beautiful from a distance was but fine grains of sand after all. The rocks were lifeless, indifferent. Looking down at the earth he wondered to himself which was the dream , which the reality. If this was heaven then it was imageless and pointless. How many times must we sacrifice home ?

He could see a thought move slowly acorss his face like the falling shadow on a sun-clock or a memory that weaves and unweaves the echoes, a plangent song of the sea. Time had come to a stand-still here and there was only a steady, constant light, a blank gaze of eternity. He couldn't help but long for a sight of all that he had taken for granted: the square with its grey-black gravel and floating pink plastic bags, the cardboard boxes , a monument to all that has been discarded, abandoned, the screaming of the kids as they played basketball and swore at eachother, and even the old tramp with her stubby legs and knotted hair had a sort of faded beauty. Perhaps he could invent that world again-in his mind.

Like an 'I' counting to a
hundred, waiting to be found.

A nameless anxiety overtook him. All of this searching, for what? A drop of water, life? First things first the poet had said. But he was wrong.

You give the thirsty a dew drop when You have oceans.
And then they say that You are generous!

Perhaps we were wrong all along, this seach for an immensity that we could immerse ourselves in has led to nothingness and silence. There was an incredible lightness up here, but he desired nothing more than to be bound, weighed down again, to re-adjust his vision and search again for that fire buried in the mirror.

He returned and had green thoughts in the green shade. Everything seemed to have changed. But even though he sometimes detected a certain vagueness in her gaze, a silence of the stars on her lips, he was not overly troubled by this; they seemed like so many infinitely distant black spots. He felt something in him unravel and fall away. The old woman tied and untied some more knots .