Ghosts (Japan)

There was a sadness that not even he knew..and besides, knowing is not everything.

The day had started well. A Chinese girl, dressed in black, had stopped him and asked him if he knew where China Town was. He paused, scratched his head, pointed, got it right. Usually, he only knew where he was going as long as no-one asked. But there was a quiet, solid, calming look to this girl (did she actually say "excuse me mister"?) and so it sorted itself out.

Corn was swarming with ravens.

Black searching out gold, as if the light could redeem us. I will not see a day like this again, thought crow, not as long as I live. Age upon age, benumbed by the terror of the stars, living in the shroud of the trees where darkness is defined, arranged, or where the moonlight slips down, cleanses the heart's mirror with a film of forgetfulness so that our thought is a dashed circle of stone. But the day...

To be attentive to the quality of light in each season, not caring for universal sun. Crow thought to himself: I am all birds in one, and none. Falcon-ancestry, undimmed loyalty, this inheres in my breast along with the white peace that is like a human hand, or the remebrance of snow, and the tearing frenzied thoughts of the eagle. We know the days, blood-scarred like a tulip; our idols free and blue, without shape. Then crow, startled, descended, his shadow before him, for he had seen something familiar in a man's eyes...and there was a kind of wisdom in his green-winter eyes.

He heard the man speak: you circle around me like a vulture around a corpse; so was your love for me: sustained by the memory of annihilation. Stones grow heavy waiting here, whilst your nail anticipates blood.

We gaze at each other,

and speak of dark things.

Crow stood, at a distance, out of sight. There stood the bright pure scent and I will stand in you for a while, thought crow. Saddened by the man's darkened face he wanted to tell him:

You know, there's no end of space

you know, you don't need to fly,

you know, what inscribed itself in your eye

deepens our depth.

But the rain fell, breaking up the hierarchies of the sun. Crow swooped and the man only saw the reflection of a black cross on dark windows, and then moving horizontally on a black plinth. Saw it everywhere. Crow, who had lived hundreds of years thinking no-one loved nobody, grasped down in the deep and plucked out his eyes, saying: you have lost sight of the beloved so now her image will live and grow within you...