Fox

when I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars

from the creeds of difference and the contradictions

       that were my life and all the crumbling fabrications

as long as it lasted until something that we were

       had ended when you are no longer anything

let me catch sight of you again going over the wall

--W.S. Merwin.

The fox knows many things, many things. But in time they were a broken image, dappled light.

The Roding has been flowing for hundreds of years. In summer, nearly drained as the reeds extend four or five feet high, it dreams of winter's fullness. In summer: high clouds and the gentle ringing of church bells, the whole vastness of time flowing on on its back. This constant alternating, drawn from the various cycles of time: the year's most concentrated one, close at hand, still comprehensible to us, all the way to ones that are measured in the thousands, participating in the universe's timeless time.

We stand, today, at the centre of a broken circle.

A poem, recalled by Ubo, after forty, fifty years...

'Thine's a summer, mine's no more

Though repeated to threescore

Threescore summers, when they're gone

Will appear as a short as one!'

And my father's father, sitting quietly in his cool, dark corner of the brightly sunlit house, waistcoated, eyes downcast, blinded, faithless, only one word on his lips ("Lord, forgive me"). We shook hands, I think, the only meeting of our worlds or that I can remember now. He said, in his old-world English, the type of voice one hears (or used to hear) on the old HMV gramophone, a simple sentence that he must have drawn from his previous life of extensive travels (Madras, Kashmir...).."Hullo, pleased to meet you".

There are fewer old ones left. Little h will remember nothing of this in years to come.  Our lives run on, a tangent to the circle of previous lives.

How quickly summer has passed! And we sit, bewildered, before the idols of the day.