the little red piece of glass
it
either comes back
or it doesn't
I am an agenda
I write this piece
I mind the dogs
watching
the wind
pulse through the grass
I can almost see the pixels
I
close my eyes
my story still embraces me
it
keeps coming back
or it doesn't
the little red piece of glass
or my
foot
my right foot
as I sit beneath the tree
by the motherwort
things return
or they pass
I am an agenda
I
write this piece
I mind the dogs
Watching
the wind
pulse through the grass
on the hillside across the way
I
almost see the pixels
I
close my eyes and I'm still inside my story. Themes return like the piece of red
glass I found on the lake shore. I was looking for blue glass or, hopefully, pink
like Derek's art nouveau glass ashtray. Derek owed me forty quid. We were both
poor. He didn't pay so I stole through his window and took his ashtray with its
cool pink glass lady. Then I lost it.
Thirty years later I'm looking among the pebbles for an echo of this mythic glass on Cherry Beach and I found a little piece of red: well, I walked past and registered a purpleness and went back two, three steps to find this polished shard of red glass and pocket it with the green and the blue, but when I got home it was gone.
Ah, the things I've lost: the small spherical Brighton beach stone that rattled, that's gone. And the loves, and a life,
The
other day I had a flash, an insight into some underpinning of the world and went
to look for my notebook and a pen, and it was gone, like the bit of glass. And
though the next time I walked that shore I found two pieces of red glass - different
thicknesses, different hues - the insight still eludes.
Back in the downtown
quarry, I sat beneath a tree in the soon long grass, by motherwort weed, and worked
at not to forget this verse. I rehearsed:-
I am an agenda
I write this
piece
I mind the dogs
watching the wind in the grass on the hillside I
can almost see the pixels
I sit under a tree
the birds cackle overhead
I
overlook a ditch where the muskrat corpse dries: the dogs slew it three weeks
ago: they caught it out in the meadow, a few feet behind me, at dusk. The redwing
blackbirds in the tree above me - does their "twee-wit" caution "dogs"?
I lie back to watch the birds overhead in the tree. If I close my eyes I'm still
in my story.
The beagle tugs. I sit up. My glasses. Where are my glasses!
For three minutes they're gone, minutes of near panic. My glasses must be in hand's
reach. "Beagle, damn you, sit!" The little red piece of glass, it either
comes back, or it doesn't. The themes of our life are constantly in the woof.
Three long minutes searching through the grass with eyes and fingers, and all
along it was there just by my foot, my right foot. I sigh and close my eyes. Will
the river return?
Two days ago, across the quarry, on the hillside I sat with the dogs. A jogger came down the steep incline and Lucky barked. (Lucky is not the beagle. He's a cattledog.)
I
stood hastily. We all regarded one another. The jogger jogged on down the steep
slope and Lucky went and nipped his heels. (He's a blue healer. That's what he
does.) So now I'll watch the dogs more closely, as I should watch my mind.
At the end of that
walk, an hour on, I looked for my glasses and found them gone. It was late and
the light was fading. I'd look in the morning, and in the morning I walked right
to them, my glasses. And the next day, beneath this tree, my three minutes bereft
of them again. Grass stalks and stems, can they really blend so with the struts
of my specs?
And two days further on, my birthday, walking the dogs to a new-found secret meadow, for a moment I didn't mind my mind and the beagle caught a scent and went dragging us half a mile through bush and swamp...
Am I still in my story?
Sitting here beneath this tree
I watch the warp
and weft
a web of themes
which vanish and return
like the glass
and the glasses.
I close my eyes.
I am an agenda.
These themes,
these things,
return or no,
and what sort of tree
will I find this to be
when
I look it up
three days hence?
June 2nd and 4th, 2002.
