Remanence

Perhaps all roads not taken, all lives cast adrift still exist marooned in space and time. Each image of an image of a shadow’s shadow lurking at the edge of our eyes gets projected at every turn and passed on from one day to the next, from person to person, generation to generation – from time to desire and back to a memory that never goes away because it was part yearned for, part remembered, part imagined – a memory that can never go away because it never really was.

Maybe all unlived minutes, all conversations still on hold pulsate after we stop breathing in the way that underground water wells up and works its way to the surface by the pull of a dowser’s rod. But for now how impossible to reach them no matter how close we come: that childhood, bright summer sun shining up from puddles; that great unsolved love. They fade the way this landscape fades – a late forgotten pear hanging over golden meadow weed growing soft and dark.

White magic

Perhaps their eyes are red, tense. When you look into them you feel a sudden shivering: those thieves and hunters that visit you when morning is near. You are asleep but not totally asleep. You are not yet awake – and you may fall back into sleep again. You are just on the surface, just near awakening.   

Maybe as you feel yourself being drawn to them, you see their eyes are alive but their faces are dead, so you turn away, steering clear of their hypnotic beckoning. Instead as you begin to relax you can’t help but catch the outline of your own reflection in the dark window glass of your inner eyelids. And as garden insects stop singing in the evening when the rains begin, and as eyes are useless, after all, unless there is something to be seen, suddenly, simply, you begin to see yourself perfectly.