WORLDS IN WORDS

 

The word I’m looking for is “absurd” –

exactly the right word for a world in which

you can’t rise from a chair and not

stare full square at, say, a centipede,

off nowhere in particular, he glides along

(or is it a swimming thing he does?).

We, that is, he and I are equals, for we

share random lives: I could have made a

cup of tea, then returned to watch him,

in more or less the same place but then

I might have sipped that tea when too hot

and so forgotten him in that moment when

scalded skin forces a re-ordering of

the next few moments of the day’s millions.

 

And he, the victor in any count of legs,

he might have gone the way of all things

had he not stopped to change his shoes,

sensing darkening skies so far above his head.

That delay was indeed the right thing to do,

as it allowed to pass vast vessels (we call them

“boots”) to plod across his path and disappear

inside a greenhouse, leaving clear the coast

if he hurries, maybe even scurries, across

the plotted flagstones those boots do like to follow.

It’s wise to learn such rules of the road

about clumping shoes and hungry toads.

This detail, this particularity, are things that lead

to weeping and hilarity – so much to take in.

 

And just when you think you are on the brink of

maybe understanding this teaming, steaming,

knife-edge wonder all around, its sights and sounds,

you run into someone, or see a bright sky at night,

that prompts once more the surely terrifying insight that,

from out there, right out there, then further, then beyond,

this world is but a frond of fern in a boundless wood,

a grain of sand on the deep seabed, my whistle in the wind.

 

There is, now the point is hammered home, no room

for design, for manufacture, some kind of scheme.

It seems to me futile to rationalise, to use the tools

we do to unravel knots, to square circles, to measure

feet or famine, to make and break rules, play

wargames and send plucky toys to next-door planets.

 

There is no reward for rationale for it will

always sell us short and we will always be caught

on the horns of the single biggest dilemma: how do we

take ourselves seriously (and save this tiny world),

despite the mockery of high-piled nebulae, despite

the silence, the no-sense, the opaque essence

of what lies beyond, past our back-garden skies?

We know that we will never know. Perhaps we will

witness something wonderful, once we become those

fronds, those grains, those whistles taught by the wind?

 

Yet the more I think of this spread of stars, of the

impossibility of belief in anything if we are but part

of a canvas worked on by ten thousand Leonardos

where the task of sculpting a fair hierarchy of

people/things seems just too hard for ten thousand

Michelangelos (for surely there are that many), and if

there is no belief there is nothing at all (belief being

all), there is something more than miraculous which is

near and dear to us. There is in every step we take

a multitude of journeys we thereby make; not

just because we may step lightly, or lazily, may

trip along or plod clumsily – all of which will foster

different stories – but think on this and on it more.

 

A meadow changes forever once a kiss has been

given and taken inside its bounds (as distinct from

another’s), borne of a thing we call love but cannot

hope to define, our language inadequate; and if lovers

tarry and lie in the field, the field plays progenitor

of every child of their loins so joined, so blessed;

and so a narrow sward may found an enduring realm.

And if a man or woman feels love emptying from

their heart, both the lover-still and the lover-once

are smitten such that neither can say their sorrow.

For one, the cure is the alchemist’s reconciliation;

for the other, the lightening of a heart too used to the

weight of a love that has sought to possess

and to surround and to lock inside.

 

And should the lover-once tear out this weighty

love and return it to the lover-still, the latter will

howl and be unable to explain the pain that has

swept into every corner of his being. He may,

some other day, at some later time, find

accommodation of sorts in his forever altered world;

but, for now, for him, he has been betrayed by one he

cannot name, and he leaves that world, slips anchor

and drifts in and out of a lonely sky of sea where he will feel

threatened by the nebulae, the silence, the no-sense –

all of which seem to know a heart has been broken.

And do they mock again? I think not: for any sorrow,

tomorrow has a pocketful of the finest mysteries,

to read under the shade of trees, a collaboration.

 

And so difficult, then, to see properly, fully,

the things we think we see: I see a man who

rides a bicycle, buys flowers in a market,

then cycles home; there will be a thousand

stories, each as convincing as any other,

born of those few phrases. For we are

wonderful story-tellers – facts being elusive and

likely to remain so. Perhaps they do not exist at all.

So listen for the feetfall of the centipede, walk

with him and ask of his world; and, before sleep,

speak to the stars of garden paths

and the centipede’s walk through the darkness.

 

© Peter Taylor