keeping (losing) track

Between chores-
hulling strawberries,
answering letters-
or between poems,
....
returning to the mirror
to see if I'm there.

----

Long after you have swung back
away from me
I think you are still with me:

you come in close to the shore
on the tide
and nudge me awake the way

a boat adrift nudges the pier:
am I a pier
half-in half-out of the water

and in the pleasure of that communion
I lose track,
the moon I watch goes down, the

tide swings you away before
I know I'm
alone again long since,

mud sucking at gray and black
timbers of me,
a light growth of green dream drying.

***

the white light of mid-day floods into the room, spills everywhere, reducing things to the horizontal, so that they're without depth or dimension (not quite real), blots out any human distinctiveness, decisiveness. ancient chaos, extensive tyranny, bleaching human reason. causes the pages of books to yellow, crumple, words all at sea, esoteric. outside is the same as inside. the parched land as dry as a bone. an excess of light is like heaviness, slowing down the firing of neurons, the quick from mind to hand. everything's become unloosened, more unsure...

your eyes become heavy, unresisting, and start to close, your mind at the outermost doors of awareness. still, you clutch the forest-green lead pencil you love. just the right size, about two-thirds its former self. faint grey marks on the margins of Gelpi's Levertov: a line, a cross, a rare star...

slouched ever deeper now. chin on neck, book just about perched on your lap, slipping. strange random words come to the fore, are repeated, disrupt any train of thought: the slow dissolution of linearity that is the work of the sun. just visible before you is Sen's Rationality and Freedom, firmly shut, sombre, solid, tightly packed with dense thinking, deep assurances; little R in her strawberry-girl outfit, arms above her head, in a peaceful slumber, blissfully dreaming of bears and Scarborough Fair, no doubt. has learnt to let go. reminds you. stars in the sky, unseen by day, quietly existing on their own, without knowledge or fear, like a quote within a quote.

the ritual of structuring thoughts begins to fade, slide. the sun-and-wheat consciousness invades the north, is upon you like a beast...

your mind strays to trivial matters, the hundred and one fragments of dazzling insights collected but scattered amongst your notes and papers, floating, drifting, unmoored...

think back, and back...to other similar summer days, when just a child. who could have thought then, D, what lay in store, what directions our future lives would take or how the past would be remembered? and now? is it so very different now? how the sun undoes time. in ten years, twenty? who will be, what will be?

i awake, jolted out of my semi-inherited drowsiness. the lead pencil has fallen between the gap. can't imagine its lonely flight. o, there's a knot i can't, won't, untie, that binds me to somewhere else. i take up a black pen immediately, and scribble furiously on a blank piece of paper to stave it off, for what it's worth. for we leave one dreamworld only to enter another.