I have two stories tonight. One, this one, is of desire. Desire of and for the open sky of deep yellowing fields of too-long grass and hills of wheat cut by deep grooves of dry earth studded by ladybirds looking at the falling sunshine. Desire of and for the outside at that particular perfect moment of the evening when and where the sun casts its rays upwards from the meandering point of the horizon. This desire is my home, I think. How can you not feel but perfectly yourself when the moon is half open and the sun half closed, when the anywhichway warm breeze is filled with the happy voices of insects and people, depending on where and when you happen to have fallen. I speak of desire, because it is in this trough of time when the day meets the night, when it is not quite either and not quite altogether, that I draw my deepest breaths and feel myself most completely. Most completely lonely in the way that lonely is wholly yourself and no-one else, and untainted by anything but the absolute perfect present. In the way that the contours of my skin suddenly find one another to hold together the uncertain air inside me to make me a person and myself. I think that it is the same for others too, at this time. On the walk from which I am just returned, I noted the joined up outlines of people on picnic blankets and benches, and the distinct tenderness of touching bodies on the grass. So clear and themselves in the pink-blue sun-moon light that takes me too some evenings ago, under the big sky of the far way outside, when I stopped on a path edged by new corn with static ever-so-thin fronds that when walking, bled into one another to create a shimmering blue green sea on the land. There, I looked at my family ahead of me, clear and whole in the retreating daylight. So clear and so very whole that I didn’t see the missing, so clear and whole that the wanting and the waiting subsided and sloped beyond the distant treetops.
The second story is of the robin who has joined me as I write this, whatever this is, this selfconcious not quite poem. The robin who is so round and hopeful and too delightful so as to appear too much for the world and for this garden, the robin who has flown from the tree I think I have always known to watch me from the baby rose bush after my mother died (mummy, anya, Ildiko).
I remember reading once that the people we have lost like to revisit us as robins. (I suspect due to their inherent buoyancy.)
Whether that is true or not, is immaterial. Anyway, I have always believed that the world is too unreal to not be filled with magic). How can the world fail to contain the presence of the departed when it is capable of conjuring soft breezes that make choruses of the leaves and fools of our bodies? This is the desire of the attainable unreal, that is beautiful because of everything and nothing that together make wholeness. Magic because my only wish ever and forever is happiness and that is what I am (I know this because I know when I am not).
Give me this wholeness forever, let me inscribe it on the impossible pink blue sky between the trees,
