Eventide

Lamp posts and hidden hands, warm pressure, sure movements, direct and deliberate, winds shuffling by long strips of the trees, interesting to think that with a little organisation a forest becomes a house. Gathered light, soft shallow lengths running by crowded trees, light sewn together in shards across the landscape, and all the people, cast brilliant by the sun.

The heat has been tremendous, the crest of every hill is dancing with the air, green shade is admired enviously, the scent of sun-burnt grass carries over fields, even though the wind doesn’t seem to, in Summer the world becomes colour, light, memory and, for me at least, inclinations. The warmth of the road at nightfall, still holding the heat from the day, passed up into your back laying against the asphalt, warming in the cool night wind whilst drawing the constellations in the sky, watching as all the stars turn towards Polaris, invisible to us here, known but unseen.

Little things niggle away, the little absurdities in many things, like the way that October is now the tenth month, when logically it should be the 8th. Julius and Augustus screwing around with the logic of the system, and other things, why we still entertain their arrogance, unquestioned. Or whether when you smile at a dog, does it think you’re bearing your teeth in aggression? At just a few minutes past sunset have you ever seen the sky turn white across the horizon? It’s quite stark and beautiful but no one seems much to notice.

Then, silly thoughts, what if I could hold the light? Bend and shape it, into the things I want, or want back, dear friends now manifest as long tracks of light, and a train to travel atop through the spaces we find, the shimmer of light as its figure is cast against the land, never throwing a shadow, unfaltering brilliance, light, energy, matter, all this and all those on board with us, who saw now with perfect lucidity, whilst we try to polish our memories, a marquise cut, to exaggerate the size, but the important parts are lost with the irrelevant, unable to tell the difference between a falsehood and a truth, the light of the tracks now saturating the world, this and all else, the inclinations in the skin, the lilt of the voice, small gestures, always back to the same thing, as all we really hope for, is that they are smiling, even though now their faces, their eyes and their lips, are unseen, but not unknown, and so they carry us, as we bury them.