A Walk Down Memory lane

The hoopoe that used to tap its long digger beak on the windowpane has flown away; it isn’t there to cock its brown crest sharply, to warn me where the next attack of fate may come from. Half the day wasted on an idle game of chess and now I walk briskly past mansions whose owners have disappeared, empty houses that have wilted and collapsed to the dusty, yellowed grass at the edge of the watercourse where a river once flowed. Only the signs remain.
**

Something of the defeatism of these dead houses enters my soul. Blood straining at bone, half phantom and half stubborn desire to keep going. I stagger up the long shadows that the streets throw at me. Keep to the right and look out for rogue drivers, even a sleep walker cannot break the law, even as he staggers up those tilted shadows all the way into the sun at the end of the square.
**

This now is high noon. All this and a bell tower that launches itself from a red – tiled roof. The wind flings a rain of silver coins through a crab apple tree that has squeezed what water it could from this earth and now makes its last stand.

When you lie alone with yourself, as I have over many a summer, it isn’t surprising that only first things and last things should come to matter. Over all that intervenes, a discrete veil is drawn.

A whirr of helicopters, the harsh sound ripping through the prudent clauses of history. And a burst of bugles that strums the tangled telegraph wires.

Curious signals from the future but not a crow in sight

**

With age you lose your gift of prophecy and cannot predict the future from the patterns that form in the red sands of time. It’s a sacrifice, which I accept, with stoic grace. Now you can no longer predict which way the two headed god of time will point.


A principle of growth: as you age, your needs grow fewer and fewer. Or they should, but I won’t moralize, it’s never been my custom nor do I have the authority to coin precepts for others.


**