prose poem: an illusion of molecules

Three new swallows, the first I’ve seen, huddle on a high-wire, shuffling and flapping to balance. The skies are empty this year.

All the big stories start with a loss. There’s the fall out of brightness, then out of the nest. Then there’s outgrowing the next and the next. What pulls us on is the yearning, the need to call somewhere home. The question is about coming through

or not.

Mr Eliot says that a thing is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter. And I say (because I’m a thing still in the making) I’m most nearly myself when past and future cease to matter.

Here in the high-hedged lanes in the humidity of a June-day-after-a-rainy-night the cow parsley and honeysuckle are sucking on heaven’s spittle. The gateway’s clotted with wild clematis, and the thin river below the bridge idles in old dreams of trout.

Beyond me the moor breathes in, breathes out. Me, here, witnessing – a momentary intersection of time and space, an illusion of molecules, a yearning.

 

Roselle Angwin