days of our lives

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one

Was there a day, a specific date when it began, when it ended? You can't get over it:we are strangers to one another now, perhaps because we were always estranged from ourselves. The hand that reached out, the outstreaming soul..this burning of our small fate blackened our faces, stung our eyes; it was like the light from a candle:a trembling nothing, a black mark before the vast destiny of the sun. It is not space that separates us, but time itself.

Yearning makes the heart grow deeper, said the Saint. But I am not a saint. We do not suffer in time. It is time herself...

As Lines so Loves oblique may well

Themselves in every Angle greet:

But ours so truly Paralel,

Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which doth us bind,

But Fate so enviously debarrs,

Is the Conjunction of the Mind,

And Opposition of Stars.

-- Andrew Marvell (courtesy of anton)

Solid Lines never meet. This much you know (unless one learns to fold paper). But the small rubbings out sometimes intermingle when the thing is done, join and rest with one another, as luck would have it. It is totally unscripted. The blank piece of paper is once again full of ways, once again a place of possibilities, stolen glances...like a white room.

Traces of erased grey lines. The lives the pencil would not write.

For a while the turning of the circle has,like compasses,

separated us and again brought us together

This is one of my favourite places, there in the far corner of the world, and this is how I will always remember it; I'm not sure if it still exists and even though I will never look for it or return there, it will always be there for me-like the faded letters I keep or the old, yellowing photographs. True places never exist on maps; never did, never do.

I can't remember what it was..it was some sort of building on the pier (some things are best left mysterious, unsayable) but there were no 'amusements' or games there. All I remember was the declining sun...'fires fragment' Akhmatova would say...and the shadows in the stones and late, late summer evenings, when one wrapped up warm or held the hands of a loved one tighter to keep the chill away.
~
Piers are universally the saddest places on earth, preserving the old ways: music no-one listens to any more, childish entertainments, a particular type of laughter...all worn-out forms in a shape-shifter's world.

It is always reassuring when one is young to come across something so old, so familiar. But that was when the child was a child...I look back now and sometimes wonder if I didn't die in the seventies, if all that followed is only a kind of dream-life. How strange to think that there were already old people then, brushing past us on that creaking platform. No arc of being intersected with another, no worlds collided, no dissolving of time's mysteries either; no, instead, just the inescapable strangeness of two remote individuals occupying the same space and time. The opaqueness of other people like a baby sleeping that one doesn't disturb, or a flower that grows by the side of a great tree but only knows its shade.

There was a time when I, in my red bow tie and white cardigan, surrounded by grown-ups, cut a chocolate birthday cake and yet you were just a thought with God, unbeknown to me. There can be no recovery of lost time. And there will be a time when you sing to your grandchildren and I shall be nothing but a dead branch of the future, a future that never was and never could be.

You, a child amongst sad blue flowers. I kept a petal or two in my pocket for you, just in case you found your way here by mistake.

Let us be grateful for what we had.

I too made mistakes, lost my way, lost count.

The era rang like a golden sphere,

Cast hollow, supported by no-one

Touched, it answered yes and no,

As a child will say:

I'll give you an apple, or: I won't give you one,

It's face an exact copy of the voice that pronounces these words

The sound is still ringing although its source has ceased

The horse foams in the dust

But the acute curve of his neck

Preserves the memory of the race with outstretched legs

When there were not four

But as many as the stones on the road,

Renewed in four shifts

As blazing hooves pushed off the ground

So,

Whoever finds a horseshoe

Blows away the dust,

Rubs it with wool till it shines,

Then

Hangs it over the threshold

To rest

So that it will no longer have to strike sparks from flint

Human lips

which have nothing more to say

Preserve the form of the last word said

And the arm retains the sense of weight

Though the jug

splashes half-empty on the way home...

Time pares me down like a coin,

And there is no longer enough of me for myself.

---M, 1923

Never Tear Us Apart - INXS