winterground

S crushes some garlic in a pestle and mortar, the rhythm of her hand movements carrying something from another place, a long time ago. Awareness of mortality rises to the surface, heightened by the dim artificial lamplight that burns futilely in the morning light that moves to fill the house. Like the moon in the late morning, unreal, undecided, out of place. 

It feels like Spring. Your frame of reference is the hour-by-hour but the seasons seem out of joint. Perhaps it's only a global imbalance in the cosmos and not you.

There is a kind of silence here. Other places and times have words, sounds. 11 and the light has become more even, entering its long phase. Still, you carry within you last night's dream where you were there, though I can't recall your face. In this late stage of the day one must do without images. 'And then, face to face...'.

I note the hours by the pages turned. Time has passed without any sentences being marked by/with the lead pencil, whose blunt tip makes double lines, as if to emphasize something. There are whole stretches where nothing has happened- or, you just haven't been in tune. You've been reading the book for years, so it's almost become personal- not because anything inheres in you but simply because of the passage of time. So it is.

And the old distances remain old, even now.

The light is so frail, I'm sure I've lived through this life before.

How far away my old hearts seem. Was I ever alive?

Now it's as if my heart has moved many miles away. While I've been here all the time, South, adrift.

I've forgotten how to speak (don't flatter yourself, kid, it's a general ailment). Some words passed down, unknown. That's the way it goes. The books, words, people, and images falling back into mystery. The light is brief, carries with it its own darkness, waiting to reverse, faltering under its own weight.

What is not gathered is far more- perhaps the main thing.

Why, then, speak of your heart instead of absences if not out of an old habit? As the heart no longer nourishes the heart it hoped to nourish. As I write this clouds gather, making the letters on the keyboard hard to see. Acknowledge your own faults, mistakes.

I must have lived many days like this once, my face darkening in the backyard sun, my hands shielding me from its glare. The kitchen doors flung open, bits of broken conversation and laughter from long ago floating though the smoke while all the time you concentrated on the flowers making their way through the cement floor. Now, I grown dark, is it so very different? Except the voices have fallen away..

As winter comes on
our fate to have the colder moon born in us.

Lines from K. Irby and yourself.