Venus ascends on a cool morning preceding dawn and hues change from the greys of night to pinks to finally that visual of an orange as fingers pluck it from a tree and slice it into segments. The harbour assumes a passionate countenance. You feel love. You shudder, out on the boardwalk, not because of the winter chill but rather the heat of a sensation akin to fever. There is intensity in you. Life. Sounds of early morning risers allied to you- birds and roosters and the odd dog barking at some phantom threat reach you and you too want to warble, serenade, bring melody to this dawn.
Absence is everything. Absence pervaded erstwhile everything else within those other shores. Now it serves to bolster not the ego but an inner certainty you are secure within this love for its absolution breathes in its distance from you. Remoteness and time mere constructs present, not the impediments once intimated.
What are you trying to say, what are you trying to say, you with the makeshift heart necessitating feeding with steadfast reassurance? You recovered freedom at last and within this outward freedom you liberated love? What are you trying to affirm you but a tiny bird watching the swan's grace under the old bridge? Old men sitting on weathered stone benches staring meanwhile at the blue. What do they see they've not seen myriad times before? You suppose as you pass and nod they choose to see what you cannot. Not yet for they have purged what nuisances meander in your thoughts and vex.
Walking cobble-stone streets empty of people and full of cats, wondering in your wandering how time stood still yet still left its intent in weathered stones and faded facades. Ramshackle homes passed down, passed down till no one breathes to occupy them and thus stand lonely boarded up. You cry for those. A lone figure outside bleached shutters you bemoan how you cannot enter and feel the generations loving, birthing, laughing, crying- even the anger and the angst within their walls calls for your audience.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Mother-tongue words flow from your lips as you accept compliments. "What a fine son." "He has a kind soul." You answer, "It is because he grew up in a home with his grandparents-" but then this is the paradigm here and you the foreigner cannot interpret the nuance. Still they nod, the old folk. Express fables and anecdotes prior to the austerity when life was lived in celebration not in misery. You nod, remembering. You smile assenting.
They claim summer brings this harbour town to life. "Wait for summer," they intone "and the influx of foreigners and their peculiarities." "No," you insist. "I like it this way!" Unsullied by babble and rabble and drunken nights staggering through now-silent streets with only vague echoes of Vespas and bicycles. Part of you loathes the annual invasion. A segment of your psyche wishes it remains ever thus: lives lived day to day, not night to night in revelry in foreign tongues.
Statues greet you in squares and outside churches. Stony faces, marble busts. Authors and poets and philosophers long gone; plaques outside houses attesting to the meritoriousness of their former residents: "So and so lived here," followed by some dates with a dash between them. Their names sound familiar- least some do. Would that one would be you? Would that another should stand one day and vaguely recall a phrase you uttered in your loneliness or out of sheer delight?
What have you writ to merit such marble homage? Words fail and words stray and sentences feel incomplete most days. Partial. The recipe calling for more ingredients. More labour. Glimpses of success astound but mostly the creation is ahead- the pot ever equal in distance from every place you sit tapping keys.
Still restless. Desiring more. Walking alongside love and seeing through twin eyes – his and yours – you feel something wanting. What is it keeps you walking twin eyes recording? What? You send epistles yelling "Literature is dead, dead!" You the avenger swearing to save it from itself. Vanity. The morn you stood on the very edge of dawn and cheered, "I am here!" and the birds took flight caring only for the disruption to their peace and not your pious nonsense- you swallowed the rest of the pronouncement. Coward.
Your shadow sometimes follows at hand but mornings when the sun angles just so it elongates ahead, sometimes ascending half-upright on weathered walls. Your inner angularity reflects itself and you dart around corners seeking kinship again. You with you. You with him. The monster fat cat ambling between pots of geraniums and basil beholds you warily before disdain colours him gone from sight. Only Lucky Luke feigns interest most morns, sunning himself outside the now-defunct-due-to-no-interest film processing shop. His old owner too feigns relevance hiding meanwhile acrimony at the phones in hands; only your son's old mechanical camera raises an eyebrow. Only a moment. Lucky Luke shares a kindred spirit.
Unlike Fat Red stray dog who wanders amid crowds tottering on arthritic limbs and most days sunning himself on the only roundabout in town- mum thought him dead just this morning but then she too is half-blind. Still, you raced with your son and you called, "Fat Red! Fat Red!" He lifting an ear and opening an opaque eye. Enough life in him yet. No one owns his spirit though it is copiously fed. What glory he has lived!
What be you doing, love, beside walking beside? Your silent shadow keeps apace but oft it too is skewed from view. Remembrances are not for the here and now. Now, here, abides only love espoused in charming tales. Forgotten words in dusty volumes too hefty for consumption by those reading fleeting headlines within screens. Maybe those momentary hours of sleep chance upon love dreaming by your side. Maybe within this sleep love travels astern to your time.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
When you ask "Who shall understand?" there persists silence so intense it echoes through every narrow alley adding further cracks to already misshapen stone walls. "Who," you ask, "can feel this love which is not mortal nor is it Godly?" "Who," the rocks lament "but a tortured other wading through each nightmare as through meadows can grasp the very idea of you?" Pain needs pain and pain feeds on pain, all else is pantomime.
Melancholy tunes from the tavern below drift up through the window most wee hours. A woman sings of love forlorn this night. You want to tell her love is never lost only its meaning transitioning beyond desire to incomprehension and from there to absoluteness. Your foot taps in tune without the melancholy. A young man staggers outside and laughter accompanies his impromptu dance. In your old woman robe and bare feet you contemplate nights of dance secreted in imprisoned moments and faded photographs. A hand waves up at you. You wave your cigarette.
Wisdom prevails in this old town. Weathered faces. Seasoned houses. Every breath instills belonging, every word uttered and heard in turn possesses. Transcendence. Gone the woes and begone the alibis. The forlorn fortress nearby speaks of endurance beyond the pain of occupation. You the writer understand. This woman now accepts no absolutes for life withstands fluid and perpetual. Ebbing, flowing and ceding not to death but to ascendance.
"I love you." Words uttered to the self resounding to the snow-peaked mountain cross the water. "I love you here, now."
