Initial Glances
The bookish librarian who stops in the
quiet moments, hidden down an aisle, to read a snatch from a book
that needs re-shelving.
The hale striding rambler whose
deliberate steps can only be halted by the most striking flower,
bobbing in the breeze beside the path, and whose lungs live for the
crag-whipped zephyrs of buffeted bluffs.
Discerning More
The librarian does love literature as
far as he can remember. But these brief moment with it are fogged by the
petulance of his delinquency – and, little does he know it, his
boss will never catch him. Moreover, these moments are too few and far
between. The words barely register, existing only as symbols of
escape from the drudgery of re-shelving. Whatever he actually reads it might
as well say “I am misbehaving”. Plus, he hates his wife, – or
has forgotten how to love her – has no children and spends Sundays locked alone in his study flipping through the thesaurus, occasionally shooting impatient glares at inanimate objects – ostensibly writing
a novel.
The rambler does love walking. But the
magnificence of the ever-sought flower beside the path is drowned in the sharp
liquor of loss: his compulsion to stop, stoop and cup them in his big
hands is glued to the memory of his lost daughter, whose tiny hand
cherishes just such a fragile flower, lolling its weak-stemmed
assent, in a photo that plagues his mind’s eye. And, though he
barely knows it, the icy air is a purgative to rid his lungs of the
tar that his estranged wife’s endless cigarettes left there. He
walks to walk away from all this and yet he knows the flowers
will recur along with the piercing memories, and no amount of
ventilation can de-tar the mind.
Epilogue
Change is forever indebted to its point
of departure, the changing thing indebted to what it is changing from. The poetry found in a glut of
literary or ambulatory solitude is just that: poetry. Visiting
someone else’s picturesque pain can feel redemptive but to actually
be these fellows is no jolly poem. I shake my fist at the sky and hope for luck, and hope that I will understand what luck is and know it when I see it, and hope lastly that I will understand what it is I have written here.
