True North is only a longing for North.
Landmarks. Waiting under the leafy shade outside Wimbledon station, district line, with time to kill. The darkness in the green. Is how you imagine Lincoln Green, which is solidly named, not experienced. The small bookshop, village-like in its seclusion. Pick up Larkin's poems for the green cover and the low price. Low-level poems, the low flame. The Marvell Press. A green thought in a green shade...
The faint Sunday afternoons and early closing. Sunday still holds within it the remembrance of an older way of life, threadbare reflections, the trickle from a drying stream. Today, years later, your face more sleepless, you sit on a green bench and the Spring light is the same as that day's. Some ancient affinity, words & light & time. The shadows cast by trees as precise and exact as they've always been, whether we notice them or not. From time out of mind, the same questions...
I help little r climb a tree. "What is bark?". It is the tree's skin. "Then why does a dog bark?" I don't know. "What is front and what is back?" Well, you usually sit in the back of the car. "No, don't show me, tell me".
[I don't have an abstract definition for all things, only examples, particulars]. "Why does God love me?" (Thank God, she is Jewish after all!). "What is love?" Has anyone ever told you, little one, that you ask too many questions?!
~~~
The following lines and words, from Larkin:
Or watch the sad increase
Across the mind...
When the street
Darkens. Among the rain and stone places
I find only an ancient sadness falling...
And in their blazing solitude...
Having one simple fall
As a candle-flame swells, and is thinned...
the shape of loss
shape word to word...
Shine out, my sudden angel,
Break fear with breast and brow,
I take you now and for always,
for always is always now.
Further North, latitude of soul, North by north-west, you find some old browning photographs in a stuck drawer. The rituals, the ceremony of remembering...your thinner face, brighter eyes, you hold the fading image up and squint. Yes, it's true, smaller and clearer as the years go by.
My face becomes less recognizable each week. When you stumble across a blog you find a person in mid-stream. Is that all you see?
You imagine moving, calling it a day, as if freedom was just a matter of sidestepping reality, some purifying, elemental move. What happens when you run out of lines to quote, or time for lost time? The light is thickening, drawing us inwards. Hopper: the frontier is drawn within...Seek shade from the fierceness of the day, small comfort in the dullness of the hours. And light, unanswerable and tall and wide...
The memory of Summer is like Spring. And the pubs, wide open all day. 1976 was a summer to remember. Your thick dark hair makes you look like an Injun'. Berry-flavoured crushed ice, cloudless skies, the idle train station behind the pub swathed in shadows like a mythical bridge that leads into an open, bright square. Floppy hats, cleavage. Never such innocence again.
Landmarks. Waiting under the leafy shade outside Wimbledon station, district line, with time to kill. The darkness in the green. Is how you imagine Lincoln Green, which is solidly named, not experienced. The small bookshop, village-like in its seclusion. Pick up Larkin's poems for the green cover and the low price. Low-level poems, the low flame. The Marvell Press. A green thought in a green shade...
The faint Sunday afternoons and early closing. Sunday still holds within it the remembrance of an older way of life, threadbare reflections, the trickle from a drying stream. Today, years later, your face more sleepless, you sit on a green bench and the Spring light is the same as that day's. Some ancient affinity, words & light & time. The shadows cast by trees as precise and exact as they've always been, whether we notice them or not. From time out of mind, the same questions...
I help little r climb a tree. "What is bark?". It is the tree's skin. "Then why does a dog bark?" I don't know. "What is front and what is back?" Well, you usually sit in the back of the car. "No, don't show me, tell me".
[I don't have an abstract definition for all things, only examples, particulars]. "Why does God love me?" (Thank God, she is Jewish after all!). "What is love?" Has anyone ever told you, little one, that you ask too many questions?!
~~~
The following lines and words, from Larkin:
Or watch the sad increase
Across the mind...
When the street
Darkens. Among the rain and stone places
I find only an ancient sadness falling...
And in their blazing solitude...
Having one simple fall
As a candle-flame swells, and is thinned...
the shape of loss
shape word to word...
Shine out, my sudden angel,
Break fear with breast and brow,
I take you now and for always,
for always is always now.
Further North, latitude of soul, North by north-west, you find some old browning photographs in a stuck drawer. The rituals, the ceremony of remembering...your thinner face, brighter eyes, you hold the fading image up and squint. Yes, it's true, smaller and clearer as the years go by.
My face becomes less recognizable each week. When you stumble across a blog you find a person in mid-stream. Is that all you see?
You imagine moving, calling it a day, as if freedom was just a matter of sidestepping reality, some purifying, elemental move. What happens when you run out of lines to quote, or time for lost time? The light is thickening, drawing us inwards. Hopper: the frontier is drawn within...Seek shade from the fierceness of the day, small comfort in the dullness of the hours. And light, unanswerable and tall and wide...
The memory of Summer is like Spring. And the pubs, wide open all day. 1976 was a summer to remember. Your thick dark hair makes you look like an Injun'. Berry-flavoured crushed ice, cloudless skies, the idle train station behind the pub swathed in shadows like a mythical bridge that leads into an open, bright square. Floppy hats, cleavage. Never such innocence again.
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