somewhat like a deathbed moment, a feeling of vague resignation, the massed currents of events and thoughts coalesce, are perceived face-to-face in silent recognition, then flow in terraced silver-blue waves to shore, erasing the humid footprints of countless forgotten lives, in this form the currents are poised, and understood, an illusion, no doubt, but it is the structure of a finished life’s perceptions, it must suffice, somewhat like a deathbed moment, to see through tired eyes, eyes whose lids are encrusted with the limitations of consciousness, to suddenly glimpse the massed oceanic plane, to sense all sounds, all colors, all actions subsumed, to see precocious waves no longer obscured by the random aggregations of wood and steel, to feel the icy stab of water on bare toes a sun reclines gently amid furled bundles of dark blue clouds, casting shimmering streaks of amber over taut hushed waves, on the horizon a dolphin leaps, a golden crescent against the sky
Anniversary (an arbitrary point on a calendar) sometimes memory quickens, swells, and flows to shore, wave upon wave, breaking in cool, satisfying showers at one’s feet, then to retreat, and mass again in the fabric of the mind sometimes memory acquires ambiguity, it is borne on hushed humid winds over waves of summer wheat, under expectant skies bathed in bronze, and passes on, moving toward the horizon amid incoherent murmurs; one turns quickly but it is gone and sometimes memory becomes turgid, it withers, the sea is dry, the fields bare, and one can only say that another day has wedged its oppressive bulk between the present and that imaginary past, just another day farther on
hello, how are you, good to see you again, to plop down the tattered suitcase in this dim corner of time, to see your shadow again, on these dark walls, voices again, in these obscure damp rooms, your eyes, lips, the vast vulnerable plain between cheek and ear, on which years of existence, lived and unlived, poured out and swirled for a moment in freedom and power, dancing and painting broad swaths of silver and yellow across rapt skies, to sink, and die away, into utter winter silence, your form, there, and there, and there, performing amazing, inconceivable acts of motion and being, one could touch it, and the mind, one could touch it also, but never enough, never exhaust the continuous amazement of existence, and the unremitting affinities of atoms, is it possible to build again, a vain construction of remorse and desire, a furtive celebration of fact, a hopeless requiem for the past, a tireless attempt to grasp what was once, on the continuum of time, tangible, and hold it again, one sits and looks out, on a brisk and dusky night, a luminous golden moon shrouded by arches of surging muddy clouds, shimmering yellow rivulets play across thick green leaves, swaying in hushed anticipation of nothing