Old Friend

Old friend now there is no one alive
who remembers when you were young
it was high summer when I first saw you
in the blaze of day most of my life ago
with the dry grass whispering in your shade
and already you had lived through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence 
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language 
and all these years I have looked through your limbs 
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world.

--W.S. Merwin, Elegy for a Walnut Tree.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Old friend, I saw you in a dream, face to face, my other self. The hidden, brighter life I've lost. Is this the way we see the world now, in dreams? Our face, only recognizable in the night. The soul is not a many-roomed house, but a river in which your dark image flows.

[Fall..
... 
..

why don't you?]]

You left me a black key on a latch..for whose heart? The heart, a wooden block, memory escaping its inner rings. You told me I'd find bridges within myself.  With my old way of being none would lead to you. You brought an axe with you, confident as always. Easier done than said, you imperiously reckoned. You tipped it over with a finger but, just then, the open thing caught you with a single splinter. 

{A single line, a fragment, by Supervielle}

Or, as I remember it, memory escaping the inner rings:

"Was the act of dreaming synonymous with the act of dismantling the block? I don't know how many pieces the block was divided into. The task took all night. Not usually dismantled but rather 'broken away' or 'split open'. Perhaps each piece of the block was unwound like a cloth from her whole body? All I know is that the process proceeded by stages and that each stage meant there was less block left. Eventually there was none. All that was not her made space for her."

---John Berger.