When the day is done

And all the times and all the places
where I pitched my life in shadow

"For the life of me I cannot work out where it all went wrong," he says, deflated by a series of wrong turnings, events turning pear shaped. "The strangeness of it all," he says. All those hours, years, drawn into the curve of a life, a life I do not recognize, that I could never have imagined would be mine. Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Am I part of a mystery whose origins lie in some fault line, some fracture, that is destined to remain hidden from me? For the life of me. So we begin...

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There was a time when I didn't know you or myself. That time is now.

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'And he thinks his way much further back
through ten, through a dozen years
with giant stumbling, backward strides.'

We have our backs up against it, the future. He thinks further back, with a rare determination. I must get back. As if to say, as if to say. All the time, the plague of thought: what if there is no time? What if you get back and everything is exactly the same, right down to the medieval paintings, the vase and dry flowers, the door about to come off its hinges, the one patch of wooden floor boards that creaks, the wrecked light, the silver still turning to white in the old photographs, the books to be burned, the inheritance letters tightly wrapped in blue ribbons...all that you know, every square inch..but what if you look finally in the old mirror, framed in dark wood, and fail to recognize yourself, the inner life as insubstantial as the outer, as plain speaking.

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She stood with her back to the kitchen window, dunking a biscuit in her mug of tea. The best cups kept for special occasions. Where was everyone, she thought to herself.It was too painful to ask this question with too much awareness. What if this was it? The sound of the clock in all that vast silence, the evening frost rearing its head on the darkening windows, the gnarled apple tree untended. 

The boys were settled, she tried to convince herself, though she knew that their lives were being upturned, that something dark was being sown. Must each suffer on their own? At least darling M had found if not love, then warmth. Yes, that was all one could hope for. Our times, out time...don't think too deeply about it. The ground of faith stood.

Fall was in the air, winter on the edge of understanding. It is impossible but has happened, is always happening. These wounds we live by are nothing new. What is there in the books, after all? Sign up or refuse. And it is over. Another day is done, she would say to herself and everyone's heart is broken by their final face.