another time

time is the space between me and you.
---Seal.

we were born in the wrong age, you and I. you, too late; me: too early, or something like that. the grey that intervenes between lives. probably would have anyway. does fate have a specific colour, like the time of day? today in class you said: a life is full of empty spaces. passed them by. as well it might. a rather morose thought for such young things to hear. an average life is, well, average. settle the accounts.

You remembered the colours, just in time. The wall, a shadow of the difference. But there are other places, other times, actively open to a different rhythm, the pulse radiating out from a centre that is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere. but first let your clothes fall to the ground. the light, heavy with promise, is neither of the morning or evening, but comes from somewhere.or at least it sounds like that.

axioms in philosophy are not axioms unless they are proved on our pulses.

Bricks of the wall,
so much older than the house -
taken I think from a farm pulled down
when the street was built -
narrow bricks of another century.

Modestly, though laid with panels and parapets,
a wall behind the flowers -
roses and hollyhocks, the silver
pods of lupine, sweet-tasting
phlox, gray
lavender -
unnoticed -
but I discovered
the colors in the wall that woke
when spray from the hose
played on its pocks and warts -

a hazy red, a
grain gold, a mauve
of small shadows, sprung
from the quiet dry brown -
archetype
of the world always a step
beyond the world, that can't
be looked for, only
as the eye wanders,
found.

---Denise Levertov.