Bridging

Thoughts in Retirement

We seem to be pinned in
the shape of a narrative
but how many (Dr) strange episodes
between each storyboard
Proust and Joyce have larned us well.

It's more than a stream of consciousness,
                                                                               Heraclitus.
Yes we are chained to the keel-haul, time,
(that none of us survive) but we sing,
bubbling even as barnacles tear,

in that Tardis matrix to which we are so attuned;
so rarely we get vertigo from travelling through a teacup
to a wet sandcastle and grit in the eyes of farewell;
though occasionally laughter will spray the tea.

Those who dig Einsteinian certainty
might say, thoughts 'shrooming,
'Spacetime's the real deal:
death may cut time's arrow!' though
others have called that Hell.

Devotees of Bohr might aver
only the contract of mind and nature
being there and seeing is.

I sometimes think that information can
flow both time-ways (in some fashion)
or I have the illusion anyway

that shapes me walking round the house
as a Portugeese Man of War
tentacle tendrils trailing to bind and draw in
memory-fish, when,
                                       ah,
                                              in turnaround
it's the fish who've roped me in and sting
till I mutter hopelessly, 'What can I do?'
looking at a gleam in the cork floor.

Is it just plain guilt or grief
or buried tantrum

the power to freeze us at the fridge door
reaching for the cheese
                                                to glitch us digital?

But most of the time we live almost at ease
in that cat's cradle, pulling thoughts from orts
of jigsaw times, flapping in
                                    to line the jackdaw's nest:
                                                                                     now...

that it is no wonder as we age we wander,
even yet sound in mind, we donder;
and dilly-dally on the shilly-shally
of those shingle foreshores,
                                                    where the waves
stir patterns and speckle spatter,
each pebble
                       a remembrance.

....................

The spellchecker tells me that Wattcrud is ignorant of Proust. Mentioning this guy is likely to score your efforts downwards in their algae-rhythms, or their  (so called, ha-ha) AI - which really means Anal Island.

.....................

This, below, very much not in retirement but at the chalk face,
mid eighties.

Close your eyes and open your hand

There, feel in your palm
a featherweight of days sight cannot ratify;
how lightly it tickles your spirit to inhabit
again its body-house of impassioned pores.

Could this unguessed shape of flake and down
have puffed from the gravid pod, weighing you down
through sagging steps of painful recollections,
inertia that leadened all your mundane tasks,
your most casual gesture steeped with sour opium,
sapping a smile to distasteful sickness?

After those wearying, uncounted miles of slow highway
where each lamp or sign sang a holy cairn emptiness,
is this what you came for?

Did this move over first waters?
or is it that little river you dammed long ago
to drink back a stagnancy,
now stirring your fingers with live current?

Feel how it melts into your outstretched, offering hand.
Where is it now?
You have no more guesses.