Recurrence at Rievaulx Abbey

Recurrence at Rievaulx Abbey

We stood in the rib cage of the abbey,
Its bones intact enough to conjure for us
Its sometime grandeur and the habits that breathed in it
as prayerful lungs, worklings in thrall to circadian infinity.

The whale of a ruin is marooned in the maw
Of a forest. We looked up at the sharp trees
To see a coven of crows lift together like the beads
Of a necklace, linked invisibly in silhouette,
And shiver down to garland a long tooth of the abbey -
A pillar unsiblinged by relentless weather and a rash king's decree.

We thought the crows beheld the lost ceiling, invisible to us
As though they remembered it. That they might be revenant monks
Keeping the dissolution at bay in a new uniform of feathers.

But our mistake was to presume that humans are the ascendant
of all flesh and foliage, that we might revive
in the empty waiting vessels of birds.
The egotism of our species knows no bounds.

The monks, when they lived, were shadow crows
Testing a new guise in the fluctuation of a wider myth
Than any known or spoken of in human words.
That abbey was a shard in the span of corvid time,
Just as corvids may be in that of stone or water.

What makes you sure you are not the phantasm of an owl,
a wolf or a newt? Is there any shame in such a fate?

Episodes of the Sky and, often, its Moon.

Episodes of the Sky and, often, its Moon.

Like a wave of cake cresting the skyline,
pink icing dawns on my suburb
and the endless changling roof
has me by the scruff of my joy.

#

A blinding moon is disinfecting the sky.
Perfect clouds seem to swish and swoop
but they're only imitating motion
in torn, obedient, stillness.

#

The moon stares up at me and
makes my walking improbable.
My Up is the moon's Down,
the True Down. So how can I adhere
To this ceiling? I am breaking the rules.
I am not an insect. I should lose my grip
On the pavement and fall headlong down
to drown in the inky heavens. Be eaten
perhaps, or ignored, by this white hot
element that bulges now like an eye
through gouges in a tattered blanket.

#

The sky is blue-black and fluffless,
as though it has just opened for the first time. Nothing stirs in it.

Unless you count the moon. So strong
tonight that it shudders my roving gaze.

It's still singing in my ears
when I've lowered my eyes.

#

The charm of the sky is its persistence:
past every house, every tree, round every corner
there is more of it. And tonight it all glows darkly.
It hums with some kind of promise
that I fathom too deeply to grasp,
a buried knowing that fails to speak –
fails even in thought. So I hold this pen,
aching to know
as one might strain to hear a distant sound,
and I write this.

A Solid Grasp

A Solid Grasp

The telegram of the held hand
Has no stable transcription.
Like unrepeating birdsong,
Or underfoot twig snaps,
Touch has an imprecision
Far richer than precision.

Even though a double clutch –
A hand spoken heartbeat –
Is so obviously something
Known and something different
From the long slow clasp
That lasts a deep breath,
Or the woven finger crunch,
That knuckles as white as a prayer.

There are so many sentiments of the hand
And yet we'd know any new one
As though it were our own secret.
There is no foreign handguage.

Each time the fingers weave together
And ask the palms to impress one another
The juice is squeezed from an entirely new fruit
Whose pulp is the flesh of the moment –
Where two hands are trying to fuse.

The rhythms of a palm union, like a clam
Clenching and re-clenching to worship
Its own fond seclusion, can happen
At length in the large pocket
Of a winter jacket.

When the new fist composed of two fists
Pulses in a tremble of dialogue, we know.

What we know is not a message
For the mind's stenographer,
But an urgent despair and its glad cure
Arriving simultaneously
Dressed in eagerness.

Snow

Snow

Today, my dream production is overflowing
Into the daylight and here is a memory
Of overlapping truth, desire, and fiction.
These three elements lap at each other
As a cat’s tongue at milk, or as an almost calm lake
Laps gently at its shores, foamlessly swaying
Its indecisive edge. So what are these
That make up this ghost of an event?

There is the snow, a mantle of certainty
Carpeting the nineteenth of February
Nineteen ninety two, in my handwriting.
This diary entry glows not from the actual
Diary, which I’ve lost, but from a dogged
Crumbling dogmatism. I’m sure it was then.
I think it was then. I hope it was then.
So it was then then. Enough doubt.

Then there is the sled and my brother
And our excitement, which we carried
Up the hill into the park to be unfolded
In footprints on the still falling whiteness.

There must be some truth in this.

The view I have now is from above our heads
As we scurry through the almost empty park,
Puffs of breath swirling about our heads like
Old fashioned locomotives. We become a cliché,
A cheap illustration on a postcard,
An advert on TV at Christmas time,
How could we not? But inside this, the body beam of
Recollection, unfilmlike, allows the quietness of snow
To be as real as any seen thing: the way it soft-pedals
Even birdsong into a mere trickle; and I can know the blur
When a flake catches in my eyelash; and I can feel
The snow compacting to a sudden silk
And seeming to tug itself away from my feet
So I nearly stumble with every stride; and the air
Pushing its chillful will into eyes, ears, lungs,
Demanding of us, it seems, that we burst
Just to survive.

There must be some desire in this.

When we reach the top of that best hill –
A hill that thereafter (and even therebefore)
Always conjured its own half-audible plea
For snow (as though it felt naked, obsolete) –
When we reach it - we are held still for an instant,
As though Time itself has reached out
To hold us steady for a photograph,
Or maybe, parentlike, to give us
A breathsworth’s peace to admire the view.
But in the haste of our heroic childhood
Only our old winsome sled seems to meditate
On its surroundings, snow-glinting beside us.

Then, released from this pause, we hurl
Fresh-fast down the slope as if no one else
Has ever done it before, hurtling like the
Descent of fact into fable,
Of act into delicious memory.

We had arrived first at the hill, made the first descent,
Slid further than any of the others that soon arrived,
Slid faster, and with better technique, natural.
In this brief climate, we had found  our calling:
We were pioneers, inventors of snow travel.

There must be some fiction in this.

But there is nothing as real as this, not even reality.

Seeing and Re-Seeing

Seeing and Re-Seeing

This city aches to be rolled past.

And so I do it. Roll past and through it,

Insinuate myself. I become a sinew

Of the city, a flexing tendon. My gaze dollies

Smoother than any image making machine.

My strafe-eye can hold

An instant or know a happening

With a ghost’s transit:

Moving through, uninvolved,

A moment’s insider, then gone.

The pavement is conveyor

To my hungry watch, bringing me

Seeings, seeables, sights, doings

Of many manner, shape, and drift;

Too many for any finite lister.

I am such a one, compiler of lists

That brim but are never quite full -

All jotted down in thought, but

Nonetheless set down for being inkless.

Housed in head, the listed seen can

Dabble in volition, rattling their cages,

Not to be set free but to be remembered -

Re-experienced in the cinemas of Sleep or Consideration.

One scene returns more than others

To the roadside that glides past closed lids

Unbidden at night, and sometimes, unchosen,

(When the couplings loosen between thoughts)

By day, a flickering matinee screening:

Two crows were pecking at something

Shouldering each other to peck the better,

Vying for food, it looked like, but traffic

Had my glances too, I am ever the divided

Attendee.

                    A bit of bread? But they were cawing

Loud and frantic, hopping, barging, as a tuft

Slid from between them and my gaze, revealing

Their quarry – it was no snack…

But a fellow crow, facedown in harried stiffness.

Hunched wings half splayed like a black angel

Unresponsive in the dust.

         Murder!?

This beaked anger and death cooled the sweat

On my face. I shivered, new-sure of the scene

And looked on, waiting at a red light.

But the next peck had a tenderness,

Is this regret? Or are they trying to revive?

Now a beak was slowly lifting this lost life,

Only to let it drop back down, hopeless, very dead.

Already a ruffled effigy, soulless and stiff.

So my first guess had dissolved. It was not anger

But mourning, panicked and desperate.

With screams and shakes to wake a dead friend.

But the light went green and I was gone.

I settled on this sense of the scene in departure,

But these winged deeds remain foreign

To my wheeled pinioning, my cycles

Of thought. I must remain featherless and

They will never ride a bicycle, never

Stop or go at the behest of a traffic light.

This difference only enhances the power

Of this extended glimpse to replay in me.

Tiredness

Tiredness

It’s a good tired day when 

The words come flocking

Of their own accord 

As though curious to know 

Whether they might be said. 

I am tired now, good tired

Enough to weaken the borders 

And let in a drip of dream 

With every gallon of waking.

Yes, as any thing makes its opposite

Stronger and starker by proximity,

So the tincture of sleep in my daylight 

Gilds each moment and thing with

A taste of madness and revelry and sin.

Now I can hear running, barefoot I think,

I discern the hastening of those who,

Maybe moments ago, threw their clothes 

To land draped and skewered on a bush,

And then, wild in darkness,

Drunk and squealing cold,

Leapt into night water,

with the benediction of danger and fizz.

Zoom Out

Zoom Out

And you’ll know the insignificance

                               Of your life.

And the relief of your problems’

                          Lost smallness.

But what happens in this macroscopic dilation?

From a wide enough viewpoint everything is right.

Or is everything wrong?

                                    No, everything is neither.

The allotment of praise here and blame there

disappears.

    Complexity obliterates the thinking agent.

Leaving only fortunate and unfortunate parts of the world.

This is how an omniscient god would have to see things

To forgive all.

Let's say there is a murder:

The evil does not squirm in a single location. There is none

in the data. The deity sees all influences: nothing short of everything

That occurred beforehand ever everywhere. There is no choice,

Only an illusion of choice in the murderer, the jury, the deceased,

And in such fellows as I, crawling between ideas.

                                                                         The entire universe

Committed the act, and every other act too – Every flinch or blip

Of motion is a conspiracy of all particles to effect all particles.

This is how an omniscient god would have to see things

To forgive all.

But we can’t see things that way. Or we wipe away

The whole edifice of agency; of self itself.

Yes, the pang of guilt is gone, but with it goes you.

The bathwater, the baby and the bathroom too.

Our Virtue and Vice is but splitting hairs to the Gods

But we must keep to our solid illusions, choosing this

Over that, sometimes that over this. Or believe we’ve chosen

At least.

If life is a technique, it needs a dream of self to drive it.

Zoom back in.

ESP

ESP

 

I wish I knew what hurtled in the fray

To land in words emerging in my say.

I can’t see ten seconds ahead to know

What I’ll speak and what I’ll leave below.

I long for a hint of clairvoyancy

To waft soft inklings of buoyancy –

 

It’ll lift my spirits, soothe my plumbing,

To know beforehand what’s coming.

A short-term early future-sight:

A moment before a dog will bite;

A sense that two cars will collide;

The whiff of an avalanche, about to slide.

 

Or in the mundane scrape of life against life

Where smaller calamities are rife,

When woe had hardly started yet

Before the sounds and ears had met,

I’d shave a blinksworth off a guess

And pluck quick thinking from the mess.

 

Just a slice of soonerness, a shred,

Not hours, years, lifetimes ahead.

Just to know my own intentions

In case there need be interventions.

 

But yearning for this cheatful grace

I only see its positive face.

To live with a constant foretold dose

Of every moment, shuved up close,

Is likely to prove a deadly weight

I’ll be crushed by, not defeating, fate.

All the more forlornly lost

Paying this extra-feature cost

Of watching what I knew would be

Unfolding still unstoppably.

 

So I think I’ll stick with the Now I know

Carrying memories in tow

And loose myself to the Present tide

As painful as it is to ride.

To A Seed

To A Seed

Dot on the palm. rolling ink drop.

Apparent speck of nearly nothing,

What are you? Iota-small, pebbletight,

Are you waiting to burst at the sun,

To unfurl a request for love, a quest

For the benison of a distant fire, high hopes

for a dot?

                A fool I was to think that squinting

To meet you brought you near nothing. Eye is not

The measure of a dot. You are Nature’s

Eternal vernal prank – to be so feeble small

And yet so vital: life is let live by the surges

Of this pebble. Hearts beat or sink at the waving

Or wilting of the green masts you can hoist.

Your pillars limber up, rubber struts of the field,

Bending an infinite semiology, a fresh name

For every moment, unlexiconable.

                                                                Seedsprung,

Your leaf placards mean almost everything.

Announcing frailty and strength in the same breath,

Which is now my breath, which I use to speak of you.

Mist

Mist into which the river squints.

Into which the bridge reaches, clambers unknowingly,

Hoping there’ll still be another shore.

 

These clouds have come down to feed.

Their proximity puts the river in a trance and

The bridge arches its back in ecstasy.

 

Chaste city, in your white veil of puff, drowse on.

 

 

Lost in a vast sea, time seems to slip:

It could be millenia from now,

in either direction.

The obscurity denies the present

And makes a stupor of the seeing

And the unseeing alike.

 

Movement and sound are denounced

And cower accordingly,

Their wrongs softened,

Jellied, and bent into exile.

 

 

But bustle persists in some quarters,

Offending the smudged edges of vision

In perfunctory parade, the ordained traipse.

 

What heavy fog could halt, mist

Can only slacken and subdue.

River

Three young men walked past another moss-softened ruin, this time not stopping to explore it. This was the third of its kind in an hour. The river beside them ran fast and quiet, beckoning them on downstream.

The three of them had spoken a lot in the previous days' walking. In fact, they had talked non-stop until now. They had had lots of time for talking; they were walking the two hundred mile length of a river – tracing it from the lichen-covered plaque that marked the source all the way to the estuary, where the coastal maw yawned into the sea. It would take two weeks.

Camping along the way and carrying tents and supplies in large backpacks, they had set themselves a task harder than they expected. And now they suffered with the grim grins of those who know they won't regret this suffering. It was no indulgent holiday. It was early April and when the sun sank beneath the skyline the soil-scented air lost its nerve and began to bite with a mean chill. So they lived as they imagined nomads do: getting up and bedding down at the behest of the sun. They would hastily pitch the tent the moment darkness threatened. Then decamp in the morning as soon as the horizon began to glow.

If they'd been rising so early in a building then a familiar workaday grogginess would have besieged their reluctant faces. But this grog was nowhere now. The gloaming is like a pin prick, siphoning sleep from the mind in an instant, sharpening the spirit and charging the muscles with a kind of fearful energy. The cold fuel of daybreak. They would be up, packed and walking towards a fried breakfast in the nearest village by the time that giant yolk was in full view, sizzling in the blue.

But during the short stretch for which we join them now, there is to be no waking or sleeping and no fried breakfasts. Just walking in the mid-afternoon, in quiet thought.

*

Walking at the front of their single file trio, Jon was calmly guessing at their location on a cloudy mental map; not worried, since the river was right there by their side, following them as they followed it. The water seemed smoother than before and it had a kind of satin ribbon rushing down the centre, as a length of fabric might be hurried along a conveyor belt. Then, reaching a corner, it swerved into bubbles at an obtruding rock and the industrial parallel dissolved in the fizz.

Jon remembered the trickle at the source of the river and ignored for a moment his schooled understanding of rivers so he could indulge a myth of riverine self-conception. This widening waterway, now just too broad to leap, had added to itself from that feeble drip at the source, independently growing on the fuel of its own will. The river blooms itself into biggerness, it swells by force of pride to a bulging deepening selfspace. Memories of geography lessons began to interrupt and scupper the myth-making – rain, the water table, tributaries – but he shook these off and drifted elsewhere in thought.

Coming around a bend they beheld another of these strange ruins. They were squat, cylindrical concrete, and stationed at regular intervals beside the river – perhaps they were bunkers of some kind. On finding the first one, they had walked up to it, touched it, and exchanged guesswork about its possible function. But thereafter, passing by more of the ruins, there was no discussion. No talking at all. Only their steady footfalls spoke, ministering to varied surfaces: grass, gravel, mud and puddle. And to the regular, consistent, presence of these buildings; like giant toads, sunning themselves, wise in the inscrutable manner of an empty building.

Walking just behind Jon, Pete was thinking about a girl. He saw her so clearly in his mind that his eyes were barely seeing the path in front of him. Beyond the bare modicum of sight that would prevent his tripping over, he was Introspection itself. Her name was Hannah, she had been his secondary school sweetheart, but alas, he had not been her sweetheart. These unrequited feelings were still entirely summonable, though they belonged in the past, perhaps nearly a decade ago. She never became a lover but had been a close friend. Though nowadays, they weren't so close anymore. They had ended up going to different universities and now only kept in touch sporadically. Nonetheless, he would still sink into these gleaming memories of her sometimes. The goddess he had imagined her to be was still in him, set apart from the real girl that was now a grown up woman, as a portrait is set apart from the sitter who might leave the studio and never come back. He considered this disparity calmly: the woman nearing thirty, soon to be married, soon to have a child, probably; and the girl of sixteen with golden skin and honey-scented hair, a seraphic tint softened this image to a blur...

Back at school there had been no disparity, no recognition of doubleness. The angel and the real girl had been one and the same. His trembling teenage yearnings had carved an effigy from the rawest materials of hope and desire, and then taken its own carving for the real girl. But maybe we don't ever meet the real girl, he thought, just different carvings.

*

Walking at the back of the group, Neal was thinking back over the past few days, already with nostalgia - that sweet tug of the heart. He remembered Jon quoting a haiku some days before:

Even in Kyoto,

Hearing the cuckoo's cry,

I long for Kyoto.

Although still only midway through this great walk, Neal was already longing to return to the present as though it were a treasured memory. And, more than that, he was already longing to tell the story of the present: three heroes, three bestubbled adventurers; mucky, scraped and scratched young men on a serious trudge towards some kind of newness. He wanted to be twenty years in the future, telling tales of this moment, but even more he wanted to live this moment again twenty times over. The present was too sweet to be so ephemeral, to die so suddenly and continually.

Having known no war or drastic upheaval, Neal realised, no bodily struggle for existence, they had had to create barriers for themselves to leap over. This long river walk was just such a barrier. And only when they had done it could they call themselves men. But already, half way on his walk – only mezzo del camin – he felt ready to call himself a man. Not in a macho way, he felt, but with a kind of heart-fluttering pride. Men, they were. Not one man alone but men together. Without togetherness they could not be men. It was a camaraderie he'd never known. And the word camaraderie fell miles short of the mark, two hundred miles short. Camaraderie was a cheap plastic souvenir of the fluttering in his chest.

And words themselves were only partial visitors in these thoughts, as they are only partial visitors in any thinking. But some words had jostled into view, tickling the pen in his throat, that pen that writes in spoken sound, as he planned the re-telling of the present. Moments spun into the past on the fluid speed in the clock-heart of the river and Neal felt the urge to catch some and keep them alive, blowing at so many dying embers. The wrong word could be fatal for the moment; like camaraderie. It had a feeble breathing to it, that word – he let that ember shut its red eye for good. What use are even the best ones when all words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away!

*

Now the three slices of silent reflection, walking in these three men, were interrupted by yet another of the little forts. This one had half crumbled to nothing, even more like a toad. Neal stopped walking for a moment to take in its profile. He wasn't thinking of a toad. He wasn't thinking of the abandoned nature of this erstwhile human structure, the crumbling mortality of it. He wasn't attaining the ecological recognition that he, that they, that we, along with all sentient life, would come to this end, would slouch back into the gullet of vegetation and, like a baby in a mothers arms, become one with our surroundings. In the epiphanic stillness of a moment spent staring at the buddhic structure, Neal may have been doing something like thinking, without quite actually doing it. Something occurring in the skin sack of his organ array, a response to this ruined toad-bunker, to walking, journeys, life; and the silence of three friends in the loud questions that a river endlessly asks.

NB. The Haiku is by Matsuo Basho. John Clare is quoted in italics at the end of the penultimate paragraph.

Vessels of Small Craft

Vessels of Small Craft

The small craft of an Angel:

A solid, ceaselessly mobile trunk,

Wings of unnumbered flap

And the frictionless inchhigh glide

Programmed into the toes.

All this gives God the lesser headache

Compared with that which will brew

In the building of the mortal beast.

For the entropy of frailty is a subtle algorithm.

Innate obsolescence, you might call it, or death.

This rub for Him that has to be

The inescapable rub for each of us,

Has to render each of us an integer

Where angels must spin off into irrational

Unrepeating nuance. This snowflake boggler,

As we see it, calms the Eternal; who says

'Stick to what you know' albeit a human adage.

Lock and Key

So low was my status in the doctor’s surgery that I felt I had to rush even in the toilet, to push the urine out as fast as it would go. But this time it had served no purpose. I found I was locked in. I had relieved myself speedily but the filing duties I was rushing back towards were out of reach. The dodgy lock had jammed for good this time and as I jiggled the key franticly, the door remained indomitable. The receptionist was only a feeble cherry-pip-spit away from me, but the squawking mothers and jabbering babies in the waiting room proved a significant barrier. Their unrelenting squall noise drowned out my knocking.

My forehead and neck heated up, and my armpits began to emit an unpleasant smell. I called out “Excuse me” in beetroot-faced embarrassment, far too quietly. Knowing that nothing short of a gun in the ribs would give me the confidence to raise my voice enough to be heard, I began to envisage the near-future: I would not be missed for hours. My water-shy, iron-bladdered colleagues rarely visited the toilet. It could be hours until someone's internal organs requested that they reached for the staff toilet key. Only then, finding it absent, would they think to wonder where I was. Only then would they find me.

But by then it would be too late – according to my histrionic prognosis – by then I would be a drooling mess on the floor, unable to respond, eyes rolling back in their sockets, tongue lolling; driven rabid by the conflict between a congenital shyness and the need for a hearty holler. But if I gave up the struggle and sat on the toilet lid in a puff of defeat, gave up and waited for salvation, then perhaps I'd get in trouble for skiving off. And so the minutes slunk away as I rattled the hand-hot key in a lock that had disowned it. Occasionally I croaked “I'm afraid I'm locked in here! Could you alert a member of staff...”, or “Sorry to disturb you, I'm experiencing something of a technical hitch...” and so on.

This would be my downfall. The lock's clunking refusals were dull knells signalling my demise. From here it was only down. I could see myself in rags at end of a telescope looking at the future. Beads of sweat began to loose grip of their squat-holds and roll down my face. Seconds stretched into minutes, minutes into further minutes. Hours were felt to pass but angst prevented any true recognition of the passage of time. It was perhaps four minutes.

And then suddenly, with none of the subtlety of a nuanced fable bearing its soul, none of the gracefulness of a mythic denouement, the lock relented and I opened the door.

I walked back towards my duties in a daze. The receptionist glanced up idly as I hung the key back on its hook. There was filing to be done. Drudgery swept me back into its soporific mists. Almost nothing had happened.

Sollumination

When the sun pours in soft spears through the bare branches I remember the day we played tennis on roller-skates. Arriving at the court, we kept them on our feet and laughed. But then, in an unhurried trice, we were showered in sunbeam javelins. The ball flickered as it snapped through gleaming shafts, breaking none. This lambent light quietened the skirring of our wheels and shocked our breathless glee into astonishment, into an awe that stretched beyond youthfulness. Beyond even now, looking back. We were solluminated. Rare sunlight had pierced us, revealing Nature's wayward swerving – expanding the possible.

The above was my submission to a Made-Up Words competition hosted by English PEN last month. The brief was to write a poem (maximum 14 lines) or a piece of flash fiction (maximum 100 words) with a title that is a made-up word.

Two Vignettes

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.