not-110-A

'There's something much kinder about a house which has been lived in for generations than a brand new one...old glass still diffuses the daylight on the latest hats as softly as it did on the rugs of the 18th century.'
---J.B.

This is not 110-A but what it might have looked like with time, or what it looks like in translation, through another's eyes, in another part of the world. Who lives there but a poet, or a shabby drunk, out of sorts with the times he's living in. 

Someone writes and I hone in on one word, slightly out of place, because one word can reveal a whole personality when there's nothing else to go on, and when nothing else will go on (a trick picked up from Columbo in case you were wondering).

To be desired-not for what you are, but that you are...that seems a form of recognition, awareness, or serious playfulness that makes us human (what does a snail desire..okay, okay, cheap attempt to get Lea to comment). A humanism older than the Renaissance, older than religion. The light changes, something grows in the shadows, a book falls from the shelf on to a thick rug. The world behind the windows, the world that slips from our hands. You pick it up, as if to think fate itself would find the word, realign what went askew for all those years...He saw his life halting in the pages of an open book.

What manner of living is this? What measure does your soul comprehend?

I wanted to learn you by heart
There was only time
for the opening measures.

"Entertain me!" she said. Has my life been anything else? (Incidentally, not the first person to utter these words..it is written on my forehead, I suppose).

110-A has gone, a memory of white spring and lemon trees and cane chairs in the verandah set at the right angle to the sun.  Each home lives on in us, reminding us of what we're not. We have no more possessions and our relationships, too, seem ghost-like and insubstantial. It is like looking in a mirror and seeing only yourself. My hand matches your hand-at least in its style. Some fundamental gesture is taken from us for no reason. But, every so often the light will return, pitch its tent...this old sunlight on our back, warm and generous descends and unloosens us, undoes a few top buttons. Most of your dark hair is swept back but some  rests and curls on bare skin and you, too, find you are divided, split.  

What binds us if not physicality: a band of iron, a house...A house, the circle of our heart. There were no landscapes except for this one, the inner world we faintly knew, reflected on shining dark windows, growing in density with each passing year.  All stories in this house are the same-no matter where they take place. Only different people step into the same character types, speaking the same words with foreign accents: a 'K' becomes a 'R', softer, gentler. There only ever was oneness and otherness. 

Is to become smaller, less oneself, also a way of being?

'the strawness of straw, the humanness of the human, is their divinity'

(picture by Roxana; words by Denise)