the remembrance of things past

or homesick for the earth...

darkness stored/
becomes a star.
---Menashe.

'Cities often feel things in anticipation, a paleness in the light, an unexpected softness in the shadows, a gleam in the windows...only Paris and (in a naive way) Moscow absorbs the whole nature of spring into them as if they were a landscape.'
---Rilke.

~~~

Many years have passed and many things have been forgotten. Some words endure, as if by chance, because spoken at a particular moment, in some specific place. Time slows you down, throws its hat into the ring, fudges, glosses, blurs. Doubt unfolds, disrupts, keeps the gaze lingering on broken things. Despite everything-or maybe because everything really wasn't everything- there is this incredible capacity to reflect the world, to frame the old questions without grasping for any answer.

The old, dank, long cellar in which we kept unused cartons and used bottles, malt vinegar and presents. The coldest room in South Wales, humanly cold. Under the stairs another dark room in which you kept chestnuts, growing them hard in brown paper bags, knuckle-like nobbliness or thin-wedged chisels. You found a collection of old 33s: Yes, we have no bananas. Passed them back. They weren't yours from the beginning.

What do you bring with you, what will you take?

The windows onto our street. A corner house, so streets. Undecided where to belong, which part of the world to face. Windows, mysteriously solemn in late summer evenings, but faithful

In the same way that the mindless diamond keeps
one spark of the planet's early fires
trapped forever in its net of ice,...

---D.P.

Despite the years that have gone, something is retained, even if it is only a distant image now. The windows' dark winter mind in November; you collecting money as you pulled your Guy Fawkes on a wooden trolley through the streets. The faint smell of sparklers, the burning in some open allotment, the early closing of the shops in preparation...

The world, the narrowing down of vision, the distorted images, the weary faces. And yet, still this tentative holding on to things that last, to things that change: sky and tree, wind and star.

(photo courtesy of Roxana)