Once you had a secret love: seeing 
even her photo, a window is flung open.

---after Frank B.

There is a kind of perfect light, more measured and less abrasive, the light from the 1970's, when I died. 

There is a type of light that hung about in the top apartment where old Malika used to live, the Egyptian aunt with one good eye and a gold tooth who adopted you, her husband gone six months of the year. We would sit there, unable to talk, and she would feed us endless sweet-dishes. God, the Egyptians love their sugar! With their tea "2" spoonfuls means "4", "3" means"5". Nothing means what you think. A lesson never learnt.

He would return, uncle Saleh, a small-time fisherman from the lowly backstreets who'd found his way to to the big seas and a big ship. He'd return and still be gone, listening to recitations of the Qur'an on a tape recorder with the windows flung open, the sound of it always more mysterious than the text, and he would wonder to himself: what had happened to his life, how had it been traded away so easily.

If a wound hath befallen you, a wound like that had already befallen others.

---Q.3:140

He would bring us back coins and stamps from exotic places but you don't remember him actually saying a word. His mouth always full of tobacco, his teeth deeply stained. 

Flowers die from too much light or too much shade. 

~~~

There is a kind of light that balances all time. In summer, in the south, the light is constant for many hours and cannot be faulted or dimmed, adding a bright edge to everything. In the north-or conditions approaching it- the light and time flow together. A moment of absence, a drifting cloud, and the land is dark with shadow again. There is a late flaring of the light, the "late sublime" of an old man who sees that everything is beautiful, with its own particular charm. He looks out of his tall window-for how many more winters?-down towards some woman and thinks of his own youth, the windows of opportunity. Even regret can seem beautiful on the right stage, if your head is tilted at the right angle.

Hopper and the 4 o'clock feeling, the third hour in a row of silence between them. 

At Essex, in those black-bricked '60s towers, the great monolithic monuments to the disasters of socialism, the windows were sealed to prevent suicides. 

~~~

A said that when the light fell on her skin it was perfect. "If only I could marry again," he said, clinching his fists, meaning: "if only I could bed her".