cul-de-sacThey create a machine for vanishing
in the little room he tries to keep tidy
on the side of the house that doesn’t face the morning,
and so his speech grows quiet.

“No one” he says
but the rest is muffled
“no one”—

while outside there is so much city noise,
and by the way what are these distant engines thundering overhead,
are spy-planes flying sorties in a war?

Their monotone holds too long
doesn’t just die out
it’s a passage in the phase of what was hidden becoming visible
it’s a signal,
and it’s no use asking when it started,
was it always emerging?
The task is to recognise the violence in the air.

Back inside, silence is coming
and I wish I knew whether the timeline truly was theirs to control
or if instead it carried on
against their will,
but more than anything I hope that in the silence
someone was waiting

ANECDOTE

He has scars on his fingers,
this so-called scholar
who tells me there are many ways into the highlands
depending on who travels and why, and
if you can’t go on foot you can get there in dreams
or so he says,
and his dark eyes are clouded.

Thrill-seekers make the journey
runaway lovers fleeing vengeance
soldiers and burnt-out mystics
escapers and lost souls
misfits of every kind,
but also pilgrims of a different type.

The highlands are unfathomably deep and full of wonders
he says, spreading out his hands.

Far down one special path is a barn with stained work benches in it,
the ground is slippery there
and from wall hooks hang
what look like garlands of brown spiders
but are not.

More people than you might suppose seek such a place.

Outside

View of the aimless lonely game
of a schoolboy who is early awake
and goes outside to throw a tennis ball
against a cooking-apple tree
and guess the angle of the bounce off the bark.

It isn’t very noisy play
if it can even be called play
but just the same perhaps it does disturb the elderly neighbours
and if so do they make no complaint
because they understand him being there like that,
on his own,
making something out of nothing,
and won’t risk depriving him of his tiny freedom?

Long afterwards all this comes back –
the pity and the waste of time – when,
at a church of middle-class euphoria some misplaced hope has led him to,
a woman practicing what they call prophecy there
places hands on him
breathes
closes her eyes
and says,

I have this image of you as a boy in an orchard, but terribly lost:
it isn’t a tempting orchard, not a garden of delight
it’s a sort of gloomy blighted moon...
no birds are singing, the wind is sharp and cold
and worst of all there is no fruit.

The daredevilHe had just one friend
one clever friend who had steered him away from danger before;
more than one pair of eyes looked at him with malice
sensed his weakness.

His love was his hope and his coat and his fiction,
in this black hour his honour was his weakness.

He was losing his grip
he was heading for disaster.

In his dread and sorrow he dreamed he was a tropical steamship captain
an old man captain with a sailor’s beard
a skilled navigator finding secret routes out of
every archipelago.

In the dream it is one of these hidden channels:
you move through it like a minefield.
The banks are overgrown, strange trees emerge everywhere
a shroud for the ship
a green and choking garment
a death coat
drowning out the light
drowning even this little splinter of sea.

Think positiveAttacks from the outside are different from attacks on the inside.
At least the outside ones can be seen
even if there’s no time to evade,
but the inside kind is basically poison
something bad (very bad) in the bloodstream.

You ask what’s wrong
you know something’s wrong
then you’re tired (very tired)
and you need to find a nest.

This faded Boy Wonder has turned forty.
He remembers a love affair and other simpler sufferings,
he has always worn his uniform (a golden fleece)
but now it sticks and stings.
He thinks his strength is being stolen.

He’s just a bag of nerves
he imagines himself nameless and alone
...is this his vertigo or his vision?

He remembers the old ovations,
pictures the ovations to come.
He must get back,
he would rather go on even a dreary commuter train than become
a forgotten exile longing for reprieve:
in the mirror he practices cold business eyes

Leave him alone Pay no attention to the story that he was left in the dirt of the desert.

No,
it was higher up,
in the humid and sloping woods—

branches crystallise the sunshine there.

It was in this shaded place that he was left,
the predestined child
who lies so strangely quiet in the patchwork light.

No cry of pain
no call for rescue,
does he almost know what lies ahead:
the horror and hardship?
For he will be found,
someone is foraging nearby who will stumble here soon.

It is like a labyrinth where he is going,
a walled-in world quite unlike
this green and rustling shelter
where sometimes there is the crack of a stem
and always the camouflage net of light
broken up in fragments,
while the child in the brief peace and needing no company
waits in the home of the mountain god

SOMETHING

Letting loneliness speak doesn’t just come like someone speaking something in an ordinary way

maybe it has to be said by somebody else or it has to be said in a way that can’t be heard or understood

Something can happen to a person, and maybe it happens a lot, and maybe it happens in ways that aren’t at all obvious – something can happen where a person gets cut off and they can’t communicate or they can’t be communicated with at a certain kind of level, and it would be an act of great importance, great moral and spiritual significance, to be able to cross that barrier,

not simply to stand on the other side of this cut-offness,

but I’m not even saying it’s possible.

It can’t happen in real time, in real life, in the actual encounter between two people because if it could there wouldn’t be such a thing as loneliness. For loneliness to exist, of the kind I’m talking about, it must be impossible to be communicated like that.

It’s about finding or stumbling upon mysterious articulations on behalf of someone else, in some unreal space and time. Perhaps in such a way one person can remember and make sense of the unsayable loneliness and sadness of someone else.

And it’s too late

but still it’s something.

...this beautiful sunset, or I don’t know what it is, not even sunset

this darkening outside the windows

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