Following her through shady pines on a summer’s day, as if in the hope of a sudden trackless miracle, the young man trips and scatters his thoughts across the nearby shores. Beyond the woods, the sky’s suffused with solid light that turns the brow to marble and the brain to water. The fruits of the earth are there to be seized… the elephant seeks the orchid with a delicate hoof.
Suddenly, he’s in a jungle far to the east and staggers, his flesh fermenting amongst tangled roots and rainbow-coloured insects, inhaling the durian-stench of all the fruits of the earth combined. He buries his nose in fetid matter as night falls unexpectedly, drawing him down to global compost and smells that the planet of water, so many different shades of water, exhales into the cosmos.
He is ready to die now, having met the Great God Pan. Whose emissary is lost in the pine trees, leading him on towards the water where he and his spirit-named boat will drown. He cannot put this into words of any precision, but the generalities suggest what he has experienced – great furnace doors have opened on him and the fire in his eyes can only be quenched by indifferent water.
DANCING IN THE SKIN OF A TATTERED GOD
after Emil Cioran
At the end of a febrile day
the lure of resurrection
only feels like more of the same –
as even after dusk, the sun beats down
from a sky that’s secreted in the brain
like a criminal god. Faint smears of sweat
remind me that I live
and, of the thirty thousand days
that I might hope for on earth,
this has been amongst the better ones
despite the absence of sex and wine.
But still, I feel myself melting,
smeared across eternity
like a stain that spreads from Hell,
as I look ahead to the exit,
the triumph of the impersonal
and to those strange and wonderful events
that I will never witness. Leached out,
leaked out to a place my name won’t reach,
I accept the conclusion of my febrile days.
IN THIS MOMENT
Once more I experience exhaustion, but also exhilaration, at the thought that everything that has ever happened anywhere has led to here and everywhere else, and that everything that will ever happen is already predictable right up to the end. I don’t require random swerves of free will to sustain my morale… the only freedom that matters is the freedom to choose, and I choose in accordance with what I am and the stories that have made me what I am.
And so, the book is written, even if we move from one page to the next and cannot even see to the far side of the night to come. And equally so, I shrug my shoulders and think of all the destinies that did or will not come to pass.
The destiny for the baby bird I walked past yesterday morning, below a high hedge in the drizzle, was a brief and seemingly certain one. It must have fallen from a nest in the hedge and it was circling uncertainly, like a red egg with wings, with little or no chance of flight. Its whole life will have almost certainly passed in a single day – although it wasn’t for me to deliver the coup de grâce, and if there was just one chance in a million that its efforts would be successful then it was a chance worth taking.
So, slightly nauseous, I went on my way and that bird’s brief destiny interfused with mine. It took the whole of creation to bring us together and to send us on our separate ways… from a ʹchance encounterʹ that has led, perhaps, to the flimsiest of resurrections.
OUT THERE
I’m dancing with indifferent stars,
whole forests of them on a winter’s night.
I’m dancing with eyes
that have left my body rooted,
from Polaris to Capella,
Orion to the snake of Eridanus.
Jupiter follows Saturn to the west
as Sirius rises. Even in this city’s skies
the blur of the Milky Way is visible
if not the billions of miles –
the lessons of the unbounded
locate me as they weigh me down.
Pillowed on the uncaring,
mirrored in ultimate onyx,
I salute the yawning void
as an egg from which God’s absence hatches…
and feel myself both finite and free
as my gaze flares like a shooting star
unable to rest, to yield or accept.