snow country

Summer now: an older mode of sleep;
and this, the running dream that follows stone
and fence wire, digging in
for what remains of snow-melt and the last
good rain, the low road
peopled with bone-white figures: not
the living, in this aftermath of grass,
and not the dead we mourn, in empty kirks
or quiet kitchens, halfway through the day,
but something like the absence of ourselves
from our own lives,
some other luck
that would not lead
to now.

---John Burnside.

With summer half on my mind, sun and the old Chinese clock still at the stroke of two. The winter of the heart an island of grief now. You lose track of where you've been. I try to recall a dream, the first moment of walking into a picture that is my home.  If memory could lock itself into this room...I fumble in my pocket for a chestnut I've saved for just such a moment, to remind myself. Safe-keeping, whilst all around me the light in the black & white photos dances, flares up, as if time's passing was in these silver frames.  My father's bright voice.  The unmistakable days, distinguished from all others. The swami, adding to the silence. The dougal's shoulder, wonky from carrying so many bags...

"What time do you have to get there?"

Three.

"But it's five to three now.."

Don't worry.

...

We traveled far, quiet in the back of the car, as we left snow country, bewildered by this move from the north.  There are many departures; not all are remembered.

The hard land we passed through, place names and histories glancing off the windows; thousand-year old churches, the loss of faith, steeples, oak trees, fences, empty parking lots, streaming by; the empty hours of morning, the talk of Rafi's death, the books we'd left behind, the foreign words we'd forgotten (but the dougal would reclaim). There was too much to take in, so we crouched and ate opal fruits; our mouths watering, our throats dry for lack of things to say. Don't stop, just keep going. It's only a journey, and don't look back or give it a second thought. The world spinning above our heads, as fleeting as the birds in a tree who were startled by our presence, our lack of belonging. But, but, through it all there was memory of deep time, left buried in snow country, of the lives and loves that would slant away from us, until free from us altogether, slipping from our outreached hands. 

...