Not zero. Not one.

I felt close to her. I felt a sense of purpose.

I do not understand consciousness. If I did, or if anyone on this planet did and could explain it to me, I might then understand the nature of that purpose.

I like it when I make others laugh. Something happens which I find an essential, possibly the quintessential human experience. Everything else feels inordinately flawed, although the flaws themselves are so myriad, so entwined, each one so obfuscated that it is hard to begin to perceive, untangle, identify and express them in an environment characterised by data obesity and shrivelled attention spans.

I don’t know that I feel species shame. I think rather what I feel is a complete lack of expectation regarding human culture. I expect nothing of it nor from it. I expect far more of atmospheric processes and climate, which may programme in human beings new capacity, the transformation they simply aren’t capable of by themselves.

But a tree still stands. And does it arrest me on passing? It does. And can I tell you all the reasons why? Of course I cannot. Something about its shape, its benign magnitude, the majesty it performs above ground, the symmetry it conceals below. The history it has participated in that I have not known. The detail of that history, I have not seen. The changing colours of the fire it lights just as summer turns away, and keeps lit for the museum of emotion that is autumn.

The honesty in a cat’s tail. The tightening in a woman before orgasm. The fleeting blue of morning glory against a white pebbledash wall. Are these astonishingly beautiful things not enough for me? If they are not, incommensurable others are. And each time I forget this, I have only to prize my eyelids apart and learn to focus again.

Not zero. Not one. We start again with colour, with shape, with vibrations sensed by eyes and by ears. And with the air’s gentle currents on our fingertips.

untitled

boy stands alone

at the thin edge of his life

behind him, his story

ahead, his history


Precious lenses range the panorama


he imagines

his balloon-head buffeted

out to the dreamscape by

currents; kind, protective


like a woman enfolding him in her arms


fear abandons him

his young soul leaps forward

into the textured fate

of a colourful canvas


and all he feels


is a damp coolness


against his warm red cheeks

Matinee

Mid-afternoon. Catching an impromptu matinee and daring to describe its splendour. Chance meeting of elements and verdant life.

The scene is as simple as it is beautiful. An ensemble of air currents conducted through nature’s score. Tall, unmown August grasses bow gracefully in unison. Cones, needles, leaves leap and fall in aerial ballet. Solid deciduous and venerable coniferous present their arches and alcoves for energetic gusts to vibrate and resonate. A background percussion of fences, benches, branches and stakes stretch out a creaking tempo. Wind chimes echo melodies into the eclogue.

Looking into the frame upon this symphonic hymn to late summer, everything seems to move as if underwater. Cucumber, chartreuse, olive, plum and lime. Oils smearing themselves in a rhythmic ecstasy of aquatic abandon. Marble luminosity and jade shadow occupying and reoccupying one another’s spaces, and folding and dissolving into the deep distance. Sea suspended in air. It stops thought. Amazes.

Right in the centre, a sudden splash of copper steals breath itself. The dying blossom of a lilac, grafted to an apple. A tree I saved and replanted in some other time. Into the colour, light and sound it burns like larva breaking out through the earth’s crust.

R.S.V.P.

Images bend and blend. The story spins and twists in on itself. Time into time. A whirling tunnel of feelings misunderstood. And missed understanding.

The truth, in disguise again, with customary gift. The nearness of me. Of those I know. As if skins have risen, fallen; eyelids shivered.

Again. Gatsby self. Unseen. Unseeable. And then I am not the host, but a visitor in my life.

Only as I leave I feel it. Passing me. A single breath on the air. An invitation to return.

R.S.V.P.

Dream