Stolen time
He read me his poems, once, on a morning like this. He carried a small leather-bound book with him at all times, under his arm. It had gold-edged pages and he held it like a talisman.
We had gone into the city together one weekday. I had some free time while I waited for a work appointment, so we searched for traces of Joyce and second hand bookshops in the deserted heart of the old city, skittering across cobblestones and down backstreets that led nowhere.
I remember that as I passed by a great picture-window in a gallery, it began to snow, and we tumbled outside into the empty world to eat snowflakes as they fell from the sky. I remember him like that, head uptilted, mouth open, offering himself to the elements. We went for coffee aftewards in a castle basement, and I remember the solid wood of the table, and the eight panes of glass that framed the view from where we sat, in silence. There was a small slice of sky visible, in the top two panes of the window, a slice of sky that lightened, then faded. Then lightened again.
I asked him to read to me, from his gilded book. And everything about that morning had the taste of his voice, the rolling weight of full-formed words. We sat together, and sometimes we spoke, and sometimes we didn't. We watched the drift of clouds and drank in the slow passing of moments, and stored away little pieces of that morning for safekeeping.
He showed me the treasures in the everyday. He showed me how to shape poetry out of stolen time.
This morning I missed my bus. I saw it pull away as I turned the corner, watched it trundle down out of the town. I raged inside for a little while.
Then I realised I had twenty three minutes to myself. So I took out my camera and watched with new eyes through the viewfinder, as the clouded horizon shifted and broke into little pieces, as the thickened sky pulled itself apart into threaded wisps of blue-white, as the sun rose like the veiled moon and shone a silvered path on the oceans surface, from here to eternity. And I thought about that morning with him, and I started to compose this post to the rhythm of the tide.
Shaping poetry out of stolen time.
We had gone into the city together one weekday. I had some free time while I waited for a work appointment, so we searched for traces of Joyce and second hand bookshops in the deserted heart of the old city, skittering across cobblestones and down backstreets that led nowhere.
I remember that as I passed by a great picture-window in a gallery, it began to snow, and we tumbled outside into the empty world to eat snowflakes as they fell from the sky. I remember him like that, head uptilted, mouth open, offering himself to the elements. We went for coffee aftewards in a castle basement, and I remember the solid wood of the table, and the eight panes of glass that framed the view from where we sat, in silence. There was a small slice of sky visible, in the top two panes of the window, a slice of sky that lightened, then faded. Then lightened again.
I asked him to read to me, from his gilded book. And everything about that morning had the taste of his voice, the rolling weight of full-formed words. We sat together, and sometimes we spoke, and sometimes we didn't. We watched the drift of clouds and drank in the slow passing of moments, and stored away little pieces of that morning for safekeeping.
He showed me the treasures in the everyday. He showed me how to shape poetry out of stolen time.
This morning I missed my bus. I saw it pull away as I turned the corner, watched it trundle down out of the town. I raged inside for a little while.
Then I realised I had twenty three minutes to myself. So I took out my camera and watched with new eyes through the viewfinder, as the clouded horizon shifted and broke into little pieces, as the thickened sky pulled itself apart into threaded wisps of blue-white, as the sun rose like the veiled moon and shone a silvered path on the oceans surface, from here to eternity. And I thought about that morning with him, and I started to compose this post to the rhythm of the tide.
Shaping poetry out of stolen time.
posted by Riona at
2:16 AM
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