Dusk in a place of darkling green

The sky cracks                                       A company of drops

as if cataracts shave                             curtain the horizons

stones to ice. Some                                still promising their

shimmering awakes                               aubades, morning

night’s withdrawing                              songs gone awry

reverberations                                        below diminishing

of storm clouds                                      flecks of sound.

shot off, like                                          ‘Shhhhhhhhhh

a table cloth                                            hhhhhhhhhhh

inexpertly deprived                                hhhhhhhhhhh’ –

of its surface.                                         Dimmening leaves offer.

Several Posts and an Etymology

Have you ever mistaken a dream for reality? Because maybe that question's a tired trope but maybe out of dissociation, whether depersonalisation or derealisation or anxiety my memories so often have a completely detached quality indistinguishable at times from the conchoidally fragmented shards of my dreams, but then at times my present also has that detached quality, in fact it all does, my sight seems to recede far behind my retinas, everything is distant and muted, dull echoes of the world spiralling about my skull. And then I get a grip. As if a grip were to be held (haldan), as if there was anything solid to hold onto in the first place - as if that first place existed.
Although I still catch myself heading towards the door for a meeting with a friend I had scheduled until I realised that it was never scheduled, that that friend no longer is around.

But that's not what I came on to write about. More scheduled posts, quite a few. So I didn't recognise those words at first, but a quick google told me that they come from the novel As I Lay Dying. Pretty apt name. Pretty good book as well. The picture was a recent post, I just forgot to tag it, so it blends in with the other old ones. I uploaded it from a scan of of Leaves for someone looking for it in a forum.

I don't know that there's much more to say on the posts. All in all pretty disturbing. I definitely had something about myself in mind when I wrote them - the 'Irrealis' and 'trees' posts that is - and it's not hard to tell what it was. Makes me think of ripples. I think George Eliot remarked on the way every motion of every life will have wider influences; which of course wasn't only her idea (Chaos Theory etc. etc.). But I'm not so sure how much lingers. Did you know that the word 'linger' comes from the Sanskrit dīrghá; to the same root apparently as the Greek ἐν-δελεχής, meaning 'perpetual'? Some people also think it comes via the Gothic tulgus ('firm, persistent'), Old Saxon tulgo ('very'); all of which might connect to the Latin indulgēre ('to indulge'(originally to be 'long-suffering towards'(maybe))). All's very prolix, I'm sorry.


Words linger. I think that much is clear. And I knew that then as I know that now. And even with all that, I know that there is nothing perpetual in lingering.

First Quartet

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                                   But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
                                   Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush?


-T.S. Eliot