TWICE DECIDING WHAT TO IGNORE

34. TWICE DECIDING WHAT TO IGNORE:

And I am lost between the losing and the getting with no recompense of time or place so that in my every jointed move there is nothing but loss or thoughts of loss and the passing of time time not utilized and therefore ended and the effect of one life is the effect of one accumulation the idle and the hours all together but to make amends somehow I grope the world back as it gropes me and walking darkened nighttime streets see people and watch their faces and find their glints of hope and happiness - those stuffed like cargo on a train as they sit between sitting and talk to each other with nothing amiss or the ones who alone stare straight out or with suspicion eye the equally wary all around them and of no particular concern are the hands and eyes of people together the conductors and the travelers the lovers and the infirm the single old abandoned lonely troubled the happy who sing those reading newspapers and others watching what passes – staring bereft out solid windows to featureless liquid vistas of swamp and factory river and bridge and the buoyant silence of the solitude itself staggers like some lummox floating dead bouncing and weaving in secreted currents as marsh-grass passes and the man-made hills of delusion and the rising and falling of old soil and rock or new homes and even newer debris for that ALL OF THAT is our scenery today and that which passes by us is all that we have made as nameless and forgotten some glimmer of the older natural world is ignored or blemished or nearly forgotten entirely - dead cars in fetid swamps ten kids on mini-bikes ripping the landscape two guys in four-wheel-drive trucks pestering the brooks and glens where the rabbits live and watching the local birds fly even I can understand their aerobic fear of their moment here the bow and arrow of chance today the force and storm of anything that can kill them and I listen for the accents of two hundred people as each talking all talk differently past and to each other in newsflash TV words of glamour and game and only that and the dark-haired one the beauty with the golden watch and blue-brushed and painted eyes in her tailored coat and boots stares back at me not once but twice deciding what to ignore and what to entice and even that moment like some fearsome train in the other direction passes blazing past all sound and no fury causing lights to flicker and dim and then come on again as all the calm once more returns to haunt us back within.