snoitcelfer yarts

I was going

to gather flowers

my love waited

among the trees

the night is so dark

the way so short

yet you do not wake

against my heart

---G. Hill

The park itself is unremarkable-except for a remote, older corner of it. It is as if this part of the park was more ancient and everything had been built around it, a world within a world. It had not only survived all the changes but, like an old tree, endured beyond all sadness. One could pause to think: how many promises were made under these trees, how many hearts broken? Here people had met and held hands and laughed together. How mysteriously ordinary it all seemed. Here the branches of the trees stoop to touch the water, twigs gently pressing on the surface, like fingers caressing the beloved's face. The water is black and to peer into it is to look at another world lying beyond a black mirror. Each thing in the world-ourselves included- has its other life, its double, and we only momentarily catch a glimpse of it...

~

The shimmering light on a slow, dark stream. The dull gold is broken up, fragmented, by the stream into a number of smaller circles, then stars, then points of white light, glimmering individuals, and finally they disappear into the hidden depths...and then the sun is miraculously reconfigured, as if all of the points were gathered up together and brought to the surface in a loving embrace..and this process of flux and stillness repeats itself endlessly, eternally, reminding us that what is lost is also found...

~

Perhaps the ceaseless movement of the stream allows the images to form; it is hard to know what keeps the sensations together otherwise. Without constant change who knows if there'd be a reflection at all. Or do we only see the ripples of light and the passing of time against the permanent invisible presence of the sun?

~

Maybe it is something more mysterious altogether: my desire for it to be this way. Without that longing could there ever be rapture? The image is not nothing, nor is it a mere floating dream in a floating world; black suns do exist. But they are not the sun.

~

By evening the sun will have started to fade and the stream will return to its former self, to being a shadow, a black hieroglyph of time. Without the warmth, the illumination of the sun the stream is nothing but a memory museum, a collection of stray reflections that exist only in the mind. Empty, abandoned and alone. And when the storm subsides there is no trace of the red or the blue, there is no trace of a me, or of a you. But yes is still yes, and yes is still no.