A cigarette and a flame’s flare. In the daylight no less.
Must be careful in crossing the road. Traffic. The many lives about me -- how shall they be named? By fire or by cloud? Clouds above me like puffed meringues. Tasty. A good bakery will have them. Time to stop and eat soon -- but with what coins my brethren?
No matter.
Melt in the mouth and are gone. Coins gone. Had so few paper notes to begin with. Had. Not now.
No matter. Something will happen. Something always does even if not the desired. That’s the future. That’s the certainty of the uncertainty.
A saint’s dilemma? Or a fools?
No matter. There is now and for the moment that is all that matters.
Though it might rain. White turn to grey turn to black clouds. Then darkness with no fire before me. Fire within. Best place to have it. The only true guidance. Albeit for forty years I will wander.
No sailor I -- landsman. Breugel’s offspring with a Dantesque touch. But this is not hell nor am I in it. Would be according to his definition. Should be according to another. But this is not hell nor am I in it. Nor paradise for the soul’s delight.
What is my soul’s delight? This here this now this unfolding future.
You will die alone was her prophecy. Four coins in her hand placed to be told this. A cheap wisdom I bought. Yet have paid more and bought less.. Often. Too often. A double poverty. Yet not to my soul’s penury. Not that. Though Midas in reverse they call me.
Biblical facts that are not facts and yet are more than that. Names. Sticks and stones to beat a dog with. Will not break me.
Cross the street again. Dart down this lane. Emerge into the flushed silence of a square. Yes I am flushed. Of pocket only not of mind. I don’t mind. My future will replenish me. I the replenished. Now and in what will yet be. the future’s shadow already upon me. The shadow before me circling to become the shadow behind me.
That future has passed.
The particular not the general. That still waits as I stride to meet it. Street after street. No somnambulist I. now in my future’s beginning.
Now by water and weeping trees.
I will not weep. Didn’t when it was required of me won’t do so now. Not mine the tear-drenched eye-lash. Clear-eyed to the world.
Not for a pittance will my soul lie down. Neither by water nor pasture nor bridge.
Bridge I must cross. Uniting what it separates. Another symbol there if symbols be needed. A bakery. No meringues. How fortunate that my poverty is not emphasised by abundance. A small good-bye before the larger goodbye. A promise to the future.
A promise to the self.
-Yes he told me he met you -- last Tuesday it was outside the post office and that he saw you later that same day by the main door of the library but he didn’t know if you were going in or coming out as you didn’t appear to have a book in your hands -- if that was their only purpose I said but as usual he didn’t know what I was talking about so I left the matter stand as it stood and was on my way.