[There isn't even a choice]

What fragments shall I leave behind?

They would no longer be mine.

"The comets | Have such a space to cross": ["Wan[dering] stars, for whom it is reserved, the blackness"] [-

There are times I think, that yes, okay, maybe I'm glad. If not relieved. That I lingered long enough to see that lastest spark. Even if before, after, I wish I wasn't. What strange turns blur the shadows hunched around corners. So soon forgotten. So soon assaulted.

Traversing along a great black from point to point, never seeing what constellation you trace.
If any. That word again. Apophenia, how you haunt me (or don't(what signs I have misread))
And of course you cannot stand on the surface of a star for long. Nothing holds you up. There is no up. And just like that, you're back in the black again.

Breathe out.

I do not forget the words you spoke to Patroklus

I remember that Nestor lives in Pylos by its epithet 'sandy'. Sandy Pylos, home of godly Nestor by the ocean. How brilliant that I find some echo of the same mnemonics that were originally found in the oral poetry to hypnotise the listeners, to help the bard recall the tale he or she murmured, a tale that warped in each telling - which is not to say was deformed, but rather mutated, like some rogue cell, the very point, essence of infinity that is to unravel from it in lush, diaphanous  fractals. As when "the universe was unfolded from its state of infinite destiny.*


*Typo: 'destiny' should read 'density.'"

"A new novel by Danielewski requires a new way of reading.

A different angle of entry, if you will."

You are not here.

Her name was Cas. Same primary school. That time of life when so many trees arch over a sun-filled sky, and warmth hangs in the air, amniotic, filled with murmuring laughter, hums and faint calls, now somehow imbued also with sighs, or maybe just a sigh, one long sigh, extending far far back like an umbilical cord to history. Your history. Did someone call it sepia?

And we were the closest of friends. She lived a few streets away. I would visit her . Her parents weren't strict at all, but they weren't not-strict in that bad way. They let us out to play in the park. She smiled so much. I'm sure I did too. And when I see sunlight, sometimes, it's her I see. She was like a sister, a sibling. Her parents even loved having me, maybe felt pity, thinking of the I left so readily to visit them. I had no one else but her. During high school she left the country with her family. Gone, and for a time it truly broke me.

A long time. And one thing I tried, eventually, after realising that I had no way of contacting her, one thing I tried wasn't to think she was gone. Or rather, to think she was truly gone, absolutely gone. She had already been missing for such a time. From me. So I saw these fading memories, and fading smiles, and I imagined instead that she was dead, that she had died, because she had died, the girl I knew then, and I knew at the time as I do now that if I were to see her once more, she would not be the companion who had soothed the most jagged edges of my copper childhood, with whom I had shared so many stoney meadow paths overtaken by moss. She had died the moment I had stopped seeing her. So, that girl, gone, dead, was at least frozen, still, one thing not to be stolen from me, residing in some white-walled, cozy recess in the rooms of my mind. Still with me, purely by her absolute inexistence, her complete vanishment.

She died long ago, and even as I say that - as you have already guessed - I know I tell only half the story.

Apple Tree

I'm stood, hands in my pockets, in the garden of my family , watching my father pluck the underdeveloped apples from one of our thin trees. The earth is still dark in patches where the other trees burned.

He talks to me - amicable today - "You have to remove these smaller ones under the other apples. Otherwise they stop there being room for the fruit to properly grow."

And all I can think of is how very, very late it is. How much more you could have taught me, long ago, what you should have taught me instead of leaving me to learn. I should never have learnt some things so late on. And some things you should have stopped me learning all together. But today you're happy to ignore our past, and you smile like nothing ever happened between us. And for some terrible reason, I'm still here, stood in this garden, when I, too, should have left a long, long time ago.

But that was not how love was supposed to grow. Amidst the shards of another shattered love, handed bit by bit to an other, a shared story, collective fragments. Not to meet while such pain still rakes their throat each night, a pain they whisper of to this new one. At least not a healthy love, yet perhaps in the margins of that union, where one still carries the damage of another gone, they could have at least spawned something powerful, primal, if not lasting.

'Though here's a song they might of sung'

"Mad woman on another tour;
Everything she is she spits on the floor,
An old man tells me she's sicker than the rest,
God I've never been afraid like this."

Only Smiles Come And Go

There's this cat that hangs around outside the apartments. All white, except for a dark paw. I'm not sure if there's even an owner, people who live here just feed him whenever. He's pretty thin though.

I was on my way to a lecture, closing the heavy gate that leads into the carpark and the back entrance to the rooms, when I saw him loitering just beyond it. The gate's just bars, so it's not like he couldn't slip through, but there he was, sat forlorn, as if he couldn't get in. As I turned from the gate to smile at him, he lifted his tail up and brushed against my ankle. I've known him a while, so he's used to me.

When I bent to scratch behind his ears I saw the feet of a girl about my age stop by the cat. At first I thought she wanted to get past and into the apartments, but then I looked up and didn't recognise her.

"What's his name?"

I stood up.

"I don't actually know, but he lives around here."

"Like you?"

"Yeah."

She leant down, reaching out to him. Her hand froze. "He doesn't bite, does he?"

"Hah, he does actually, but his teeth just kind of hold your hand in them. He doesn't press in his teeth. And if he swipes at you he keeps his claws in."

She flashed a grin. "If he scratches me I'll do the same to you." She reached out, and the cat let her run her fingers down his spine. When she smiled, her lips drew back and showed gums. Her teeth were white. Her skin dark with the warmth of another day's sun. Perhaps another life's sun, an ancestor's sun. Her eyes, I'm sure, illuminated the most profound caverns.

She rose, and I saw for the first time the silent friend with her. She smiled again, leaning on his shoulder, entwining her arm about him. They walked off, and she turned briefly to wave goodbye to me.

When I finally looked back down, the cat was gone, and the gate had shut.

Mad Girl's Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"


-Sylvia Plath

How many of us have fallen for ghosts?

Sorry about the lack of updates. I've been having the worst dreams. Really tired right now, but let's look at the last few scheduled posts...

The 12th of June entry, like any mention of 'words caught in mouth' probably has the phantom of Sappho in it:

He seems to me equal to the gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
     to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing — oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
     is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
     fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead — or almost
     I seem to me.
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty . . .

(Fragment 31, trans. Anne Carson).

Though that doesn't mean I had it in mind. Maybe the world and the clouds held in in mind. Funnily enough, looking at the post now, "my gut grows sore" reminds me of another poem, also to do with that old Lyric:

Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?

Before a face suddenly numinous,

her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate   

again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss?   

It’s documented torrents are unloosed

by such events as recently produced

not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us,   

one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate.

My eyes and groin are permanently swollen,   

I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless

—and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.   

Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast,   

sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest

of what I want with you that scares me shitless.

(Marilyn Hacker, '[Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?]' in Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons)

Brilliantly visceral.

Come to think of it, there's a lot of Greek floating around in these few posts. And in my blog in general. It makes me think of a friend I knew a long time ago. Castillia, I think she was called. Back in primary school. I think around when we were eleven she moved to some island on the Mediterranean, near Athens. I don't know her anymore, and even if I managed to get back in touch, would I know her any more?

Oh right, Greek literature. So "The long unmeasured pulse of time moves ever[y] thing" is from Sophocles I think. He's mentioned a few lines later. Or maybe it was Aeschylus. An ancient tragedy writer, at any rate.

As for the image of the stairs, I tried searching by image for it on Google, but couldn't find a direct match. Just a hall of other dark grey and black images.