the grey or the blue

When the forests have been burned their darkness remains.
--W.S. Merwin.

With all my thoughts I went right out of the world:
there you were,
you my gentle one,
you my open one

The reason to remember. The necessity of remembering. Lest this slant of radiant colours is taken for reality. The reason to forget. The necessity of it. Or else the silver inherits the black.

And yet each grey face is unaware of its own withering glances, the layers of ash, just as hands are innocent of their cruelty. Time in the world exists. A bare fact. Some things can be recovered, and sometimes capstones shift. But who can say? Who amongst us has the strength to imagine such things?

I must remember to forget you.
~~~~

You sit on a cold slab of concrete in the cool night, the early hours of the morning, waiting... It is good to be under the open skies, see clouds and moon and stars mingle with reflected lights. And you don't ask any more: what is real? Only the philosopher or the dead ask such questions. No thought comes to you in this city. Just the waiting, and the detached observation of other people's lives. Departures and arrivals; simple, inexhaustible huddled existence.

The dark blue lightens, softens. The re-entry of light into the world. Some old men in ragged clothes are still praying as newly married couples talk to each other tenderly, full of longing. A few people wake from their slumber, yawn like lions, then stretch and unwind as if they'd been kept in a box for an age or just been resurrected.

"Soon it will be day", you mumble to yourself, your lips uttering the unscripted. And this is enough to bring assurance. Soon it will be day.