days of our lives

Piers are universally the saddest places on earth, preserving the old ways: music no-one listens to any more, childish entertainments, a particular type of laughter...all worn-out forms in a shape-shifting world.

Let us be grateful for what we had.

I too made mistakes, lost my way, lost count.

The era rang like a golden sphere,

Cast hollow, supported by no-one

Touched, it answered yes and no,

As a child will say:

I'll give you an apple, or: I won't give you one,

It's face an exact copy of the voice that pronounces these words

The sound is still ringing although its source has ceased

The horse foams in the dust

But the acute curve of his neck

Preserves the memory of the race with outstretched legs

When there were not four

But as many as the stones on the road,

Renewed in four shifts

As blazing hooves pushed off the ground

So,

Whoever finds a horseshoe

Blows away the dust,

Rubs it with wool till it shines,

Then

Hangs it over the threshold

To rest

So that it will no longer have to strike sparks from flint

Human lips

which have nothing more to say

Preserve the form of the last word said

And the arm retains the sense of weight

Though the jug

splashes half-empty on the way home...

Time pares me down like a coin,

And there is no longer enough of me for myself.

---M, 1923

~

Bridges connect one place to another, so don't build a home on one. The world is a bridge, a floating bridge. Piers, on the other hand, are sad because they are beyond any question of being useful; at best they are places of mild entertainment and forgetfulness. A pier is not a space at all...

There are other 'spaces', like the threshold space, the dihliz; the places in-between, full of wonder, in which there is the possibility of movement, and insofar as a window is neither inward nor outward it, too, is such a space. Can any place take on these qualities? If I sit on the landing steps, for example, a bench in a park under some leafy shade? I am neither still nor am I on the go; neither wholly in the park like the others but nor am I totally alone with myself. Who knows who b is?

To walk out into the sea; to walk back into the sea, the ancient sway of the world holding it together. We have lived indoors for too long. 

Can you at this moment recall the particular feeling at the time, now that's it's so entangled with memory, now that childhood is well and truly over? Think of S. Name it, keep your finger on it if you can. The transience of our lives needs re-telling. The words said in order..In the beginning...our desire for the perfect sentence, form open so that we return to it again, the same, yet different. 

The same. The same
Then once, in a flash,
fresh ground...
black, grey, green and blue.

--Lowell.

Are we so different, then, from the cave dwellers who needed images to remind themselves of absences, loss, who imagined distances and the traversing of distances in the darkness? And who still could dream of finding a way back to who they were.