VANILLA by "James Dazell"

JAMES

ANDERSON'S

VANII IA

TEN

Jeane whispered at the clouds "that one looks like a turtle" and again a few seconds later "and that one looks like a dragon" she lay on her back beside me waving her fingers at the sky as if painting water colours of the afternoon. We were only children, of course, and all that occurred to us in this time in our lives was the heat of the summer sun and the shapes of unfurling clouds that passed through the sky like horses on carousels.

The sun was the only memory as a child. Jeane felt the warmth of the sun on her hand as the shadows of the day passed over her. The coolness of her body was lifted by the radiance of light that stretched over us. We were unphased by the summer wasps with their curved honey coloured tails, they were the size of our thumbs, and flew around the garden like toy helicopters with the buzz of distant tree loppers.

I had my dungarees on, the ones that reached down a little passed the knee and my socks pulled high above my trainers, and a tshirt. The clips on my dungaress dug a little in to my back as I lay on the grass, and ever since I was a boy I'd never felt comfortable lying on my back. Something with my bones or my muscles maybe...

There were no other children in the garden. Alone it was Jeane, and I. The flowering season allowed the garden to appear like a secret forest and we were in some secluded clearing on a grassy mound by a secret lake. Jeane always used to encourage my imagination in playing thought games. She was lovely, and open to everybody. She never seemed to conceal her private thought or lock them up for only one other or herself to see.

She was public in her expressions, she loved and appreciated so much. I so clearly remember those moments of lying in the garden together in the summer. I'm not quite sure if the season was summer, all youth is summer in the memory.

As children, moving through the city was like moving through canyons of granite and glass. Everything was white like a swan's body and I just wanted to sleep. The city which did not seem giant to me then but only an incalculable, unthinkable size and I only fathomed what I saw, without relation to its real map.

I remember there was this ice-cream parlour, they'd keep all the ice-creams in containers under the counter, they were all refrigerated there but there was this sort of whisk thing that kept stirring them making swirls of ice cream in vanilla, strawberry, mint, chocolate and others, and we'd often swing by the place to buy something but I really just wanted to stare at the vanilla whisk, twisting and making circles in the creamiest, yummiest, ice-cream I'd ever seen. It wouldn't probably be as impressive to me now if I saw it again, but back then I thought it was just marvelous.

I fell asleep in the dream-like sunlight of the afternoon that bounced off the glass just like the sunlight bouncing off the ocean. We often fell asleep under the sun in the garden.

Jeane did so almost by habit as though it were a playtime between us that we shared together.

"I like sleeping outside." she told me once, "I can sleep much better outside than indoors. Something about the sun I suppose. If I wake up in my bed I know that it's my bed, and there will be my room and my mother and my teddy and all the things I see every morning. But when I wake up outside I feel as though there could be anything."

We would take our bodies to cool off from the heat in the swimming pool laid in my garden. The pool lay shimmering in the sunlight, whilst our feet dangled over the edge lightly touching its surface, causing all the minor ripples to swim down the length.

We'd hold our breathes for as long as possible under water, pretending to be marine mammals and fish, fanning our legs out like tails, we'd open our eyes under the water seeing each other, waving and making silly faces. We'd swim to the bottom and try to sit crossed legged on the floor like we did in the school hall, except we'd move in slow motion and lift off the floor of the pool like we weighed nothing at all. We'd come rushing up to the surface and take a deep breath of air and laugh. We'd run up to the pool and leap in, holding our arms around our legs and tucking our knees to our chest, our feet would strike the water and a huge splash would leap up and soak the lagoon plants that leaned in for the cool.

There were little handprints that could be seen on the patio glass as the sun turned in the afternoon, mixing light and shadow, and everything merged in to one image like moving water reflected on to walls, whilst white light caught shimmering leaves in the afternoon breeze.

"I just had a dream." Jeane said nudging me to wake up. And I breathed out trying to remember our whereabouts.

"What did you dream?" I asked in a little breath of a yawn.

Jeane would have remarkable dreams that were full of imaginative worlds that I could never envision in my sleep. She had absorbed so much from her little life that it all seemed to fall on her like the ice cream that would melt in the sun.

We'd lay on the poolside loungers, falling asleep in the sun beneath the parasols, like the visitors in the summer at Tuileries. The sun shone its brilliance as though it were hovering directly above the garden, encrusted with diamonds that shimmered against itself revealing blues, greens, pinks, and yellows, when we tried to stare at it.

The sky was clear enough that the moon was visible in the day light.

"If you look at the moon tomorrow night," she said, "and I look at the moon tomorrow night, that will be same moon. And although we won't be anywhere near each other it will be like we are because we're looking at the same moon together."

Sunlight danced between the wavering tree tops, stretching everything over motions to our eyes and we lay still, on our backs, shielding our eyes watching the redness of our eyelids as we closed them in the sunshine.

The afternoon had reached its full heat and the drier grass was already turning to the colour of coastal beachgrass.

"Are you still sleeping?" Jeane asked me.

I furrowed my eyes in the light and yawned.

"I've just had a strange dream," she expressed animatedly.

I looked over and smiled "what did you dream, Jeane?"

She had been awake for some time waiting impatiently for me to wake up, with an eagerness that seemed to have grown with the passing minutes.

"I've been trying to remember," she answered quickly, "Don't say anything else or I might forget it."

I moved my hand across my lips as if to gesture that they would stay sealed until she'd finished.

We'd sit in silence beside each other at the pool, the waters would play and dance across the surface in the stillness of the afternoon. There were smells of smoke from summer barbecues. And there was this slushing sound as though there were invisible swimmers that moved between the ripples of the pool.

The ocean-deep pale blue of the night sky overtook the day. The sound was taken asunder with the sun. Each star that adorned its bedded blanket was a night chime in the sky that too soon faded out with the cooly blowing night. Goodnight, I whispered. I left her, blowing kisses to those people of the past, like midnight search lights that float over the ocean, carrying sparkled lanterns under the night sky.

What do you dream now, Jeane?

*

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Choral Ode 1 I do not know if the years behind could have predicted this present. When would my youngest self have predicted today? I am not meant to know; I will not know. So much of life is unplanned and unpromised. We do what we can in the moments that we’re living.

So much rests on chance. The present is everything, knowledge remains ignorant; wisdom is the anticipation of not knowing.

If we knew the route why would we begin? It is well enough we don’t know so we keep wandering through, wondering what the next event will be after this one. If we knew the route to our lives from the beginning all our pleasures would not have occurred, for we would not have met them in the same way, not have desired to meet them by way of mistakes, and meeting them differently may somehow not make them pleasures at all. To enjoy a single moment is to enjoy every moment that ever occurred. Good or ill, to be happy once is to be happy at the entire time.

Just as the eye cannot see itself, we cannot fully appreciate our present life we feel too partial to it to know it and our thoughts drift ahead and behind. We cannot know more than the hours which we live. Our foresight comes not to us when we open tomorrow’s door, our imagination was but a mirage in the desert. Today is all. Tomorrow has no lobby. *

*

*

EIGHTEEN All things begin with meeting.

"There had always been something between you and me" Dick says at the end of an Francis S. Fitzgerald novel. What was that something? I'd heard it said so often. Strange, that for all the people in the world, there were occasionally one or two you would come across at a time where there would be this something between you, as though it were a real and material something that we could see and touch. Jessica and I had that. Naturally we experienced it as a kind of music, as a kind of electrical chord that connected us together, like magnets and the effect that iron fillings leave as they flow along the current.

That was our something between us, she was positive and I was positive.

I never forgot that time when I first met her on the twelfth story of a Westminster hotel balcony. She was young, and all the pleasures of her financial circumstance couldn't eliminate the chaos that youth heaps upon the young. Things which at a later date are cynically seen as fictitious drama for the lack of world engagement. There was some truth to the opinion, but more often that theory fell through. There are those always ready to deny that the privileged have any troubles, worries, problems, or fears in life. But believe me, all the Hells seem worse from Heaven.

Our families were of well-to-do society, and would meet at these social gatherings for charity fundings, award celebrations, or faux-events created to gather the wealthy of London in one space so new businesses and investors could make connections with established success. And the established would bring their families along to maintain the appearance of stability of their success and beam aspirations of a beautiful wife and children in the eager young entrepreneurial. That was why I was there.

They always took place in hotels, hired out for the occasion. These occasions were always brilliantly decorated, tables dotted around the room like dots of a poka-dot skirt, the yellow sunlight beamed on the soft cream tablecloths and marquee parasols.

Anonymous men and women appeared, come to make connections and hustle some new deals, or something. Most of my memory were based on what I disliked about it than what I knew. There was always some flustered woman rushing around with a clipboard and an ear piece in a black suit and red hair trying to hold everything together. She would look at you as though she had some kind of electronic laser eye that scanned your outfit to check you were appropriate. She came up to me and straightened my collar and would say things like "try not to look so defeated," with a forced smile. I wasn't entirely sure if she was capable of smiling, that might have been the first time. The whole event was rather boring to me, and I amused myself with how dramatically I could sigh.

But there was one evening I met Jessica, as though out of all the commotion there was a figure that came out of the hysteria of the dark.

In those days I felt small in the expanse of this great circling world. Everybody else seemed to know what they were doing, how to behave in this place or that, strangers would just walk up each other and just talk and appear to be having a good time like it was nothing. Most of the time I didn't know what or how to be so I just kept up with everybody else. The only things I understood and made sense were things four paces in front of me. The rest of the commotion was a busy hubbub that was beyond my understanding and just seemed to flow like the butterflies that scattered around forests.

Jessica seemed to help make sense of everything as though all that she consisted of were all the right elements of the world I'd been looking for and through her all things were good and correct, and I would never swerve off course in life if I lived to the measure of her affections and favour. There was a path in my life as though it would be forever remembered as the name Jessica. I'd brand it to that year of my life which would define a whole summer.

Jessica and I were only teenagers, eighteen. I remember when she first appeared to me, reflecting back on the moment, that still emanates clear in my mind. She dressed as though the air itself had woven her garments around her. Her whites and blues blended perfectly in to the city skyline and the balcony where I first saw her. The canvas to this scene was the peach blushed sky of the early evening. Jessica was a real marvel. Her hair then was golden, soft, a length to her shoulder bones. She wore a long-sleeved white, skirt, black shoes. Her parents were people she'd later only described to me as economists and right up to the dissolution of our friendship, I'd never been curious to ask what exactly that meant. In any case, her troubles were not financial ones, but nevertheless all the same troubles for a girl her age then. She consciously slimmed herself, the way girls after looking through internet streams of slim girls and trained themselves to have as similar figure as possible by the fastest means, which meant often she ate little and moved less. She lacked energy and this made her fatigued, subsequently she felt miserable a lot of the time, slightly irritable, and looked disdainfully at the world as though it looked back at her with some secret disapproval.

Jessica leaned herself dangerously over the balcony of the hotel, the breeze hoping to settle her back with its blow. Her golden hair moved rhythmically in the wind. Her face filled with all of spring's sweet youthfulness. Now that I know her, I realise then she leaned herself over the balcony railings because that was laughing back at the world's opinion of her. To be truthful, she was very well liked, curious to boys, good humoured to her friends, and her parents knew about all the things she thought she successfully kept hidden. But she was young enough that her own private thoughts were what she believed the world thought of her, still of an age when emotions made up most of reality. It was a kind of freedom to lean over the edge. There was some liberty in the danger, not from the fall, but from the punishment. She felt at the back of her mind she affected nothing and no one. She stared out across London in lost thoughts There was always something else to consider and someone else to be who might improve her in some way. So she leaned over the balcony staring at the London skyline and the amber skies with dusty clouds, whilst the breeze tried to lean her back.

The outward appearance of her life seemed fantastic. I couldn't consider her like anybody I'd meet on an average evening, in all those dinner parties with family friends, Jessica was a real privileged type. She swung around fashionable places and was looked after by that indulgence that young men adorned on to girls of 'good society', who belonged to families that were well connected. The city meant little, London wasn't like a neighbourhood, it was as though it belonged to a boulevard lined up of large houses alongside New York, Shanghai, Rome, Moscow, and Paris, as though house number nine was London and we skipped from door to door by areoplanes and private cars. Hopping over to Paris for us was like taking a train ride over to the neighbouring town for some others. A lot of people got lost in London, for us, there was only a select number of places you would be seen and we'd all come to know all those by the time we were fifteen.

Her friends didn't interest me the way she did, they didn't interest me much at all.

They just fluttered around her with excitement, enjoying her association. They were like ministers to some ancient duchess. They didn't contain any of the excitement of Jessica had in my eyes. They weren't as beautiful, weren't as interesting, or pleasant to be around.

Jessica gathered lots of interest from boys whether she was in London or across the world lying on a lounger under the sun on a tropical beach in Asia, and she had friends she considered close dotted around all over the world. At this time I was able to see her about every two weeks, which seems a distance of years.

These business events our families would go to happened every two weeks of the year, and in the beginning Jessica and I only met when our families crossed paths at these gatherings, things which they did to keep business connections stable and close. So we got to know each other slowly, or as I thought of it, we got to know each other comfortably. Outside the time I got to see Jessica, the rest of the time she was a mystery to me, and I only had my own life to colour in all my curiosities. I believed the next time I'd see her I'd have lost her.

But Jessica and I got to know each other of the summer of my eighteenth and for those brief five months they were some of the most blissful I remember.

I arrived with anticipation that she wouldn't be there, which meant it would be a month until I'd possibly see her again, and if she wasn't here that time I don't know what I'd do. I tried to divert my emotions from the sinking disappointment and draw their attention to the pleasure I took in some music, and sullenly took out some discreet headphones and placed them in my ears.

"Can I listen?" a voice said approaching from my right, Of course it was Jessica. I don't remember answering, I don't remember gesturing, and more probably I gave her an expression as though I was open to giving her the permission to do anything she had ever wished for in her life. She sat down beside me and took one of the ear pieces out of my ear and placed it in one of her own ears.

"I like it," she said "Yeah?"

"What else do you have?" she asked I was still young and filled with all those natural insecurities. A wave of terror passed over me. Here I'd had it, surely the next choice on my player was going to be something she hated, she'd stand and leave, and it would be her last and most vital impression of me.

"Why don't you have a look," I replied handing her my player.

She scrolled through reading the names of artists and nodded occasionally at ones she recognised as though confirming and grading my selection. She smiled and stopped on one and chose a track.

"Oh I love this!"

"This one? Yeah not many people have heard of this, but I really like it."

She made no reply, but a sound as if to acknowledge she'd heard it, and I felt as though I were interrupting her listening a little and kept quiet for a moment or two whilst she enjoyed.

Music, it was something that connected the whole world, spanned generations, and centuries in bringing people together under a melody or a lyric, but at the same time could be so personal as though you were the only one in the history of world who had

ever experienced or understood it.

She passed her eyes around the room ahead of her, looking at the suits and women wearing fascinators sipping martinis.

"These things are such a drag, right?" she remarked.

"Tell me about it."

She came over to me the net few times, and soon I understood that I was able to enter her world and sat with her as she had pleasantly come to expect. I became a sort of emblem of cynicism to the place, a sort of satirical charade to the whole spectacle of the event which amused her very much and we bonded quickly on our loves our hates and our laughter. These moments brought a sense of instant comfort between us and really sparked our electricity.

The beginning were filled with warming flirtations, gravitating us together each week, observing the company with mocking remarks and sniggerings under our breaths, hidden away behind menus or napkins. Like most young boys and girls we viewed everyone adult with a kind of comic appeal, as though we would never become the men and women we saw, as though none of their troubles or circumstances would ever find their way in our lives as we grew older. We viewed them with a kind of advanced warning. And laughed as though we had just won before the race. We became close quickly and upon reuniting each fortnight, Jessica would begin talking as though we'd been sat together involved in conversation for an hour and was now collecting her sentence from where she had briefly left off. We were as comfortable as old friends and as excited about each other as new ones.

We felt very out of keeping with these events. Not because we were opposed to the formalism of it all. But because we were young and the place was a facade for the canned laughter, polite gestures, and the diary makings of hungry young professionals and old men whose youth was entirely in their freshly pressed suits. The hand-drier in the gentleman's bathroom was constantly in use to hand-dry the sweat from shirts that had been dripping from the nervousness of the younger ones after their interviews, the blue shirts deepening in to a dark blue like the ocean as it descends rapidly from a shoreline.

The meticulous concern for the right cuff-link, the gold pin on the breast pocket, the seemingly unfashionable but professional red tie against a blue shirt, that pronounced itself against a turned down white collar, and a blazer that was off-blue, a navy like the ones they remembered as school boys; that Eton blue and Camberwell navy. It was a world a thousand kilometers away from us, one that I didn't recognise any identity with and was a kind of plaster board film-set for the episodes that Jessica and I appeared in every fortnight. And in that something between Jessica and I, each fortnight every touch, presence, sound, brought us closer as if our magnets charged by our new activity.

I was impossible. Already swallowed up in to the fantasy of a girl I barely knew or understood whose existence had effected me. We'd circle the city at night, venturing in to places as thought we were caught in the buzz of the millions of tourists in London. We felt a special appeal to ourselves as though wherever we went the shop owners should welcome up with delight like a proud endorsing of their venue, that we, Jessica and I, had chosen it that moment. A sort of notoriety of the world as though all the great lovers of history would be declaimed once the world had discovered us. We went to the cinema watching actors spread across the giant silver screen that rose floor to ceiling and wall to wall, appearing like gods to their small audience, and we struck our necks up like altars to

the divine. We'd wait in the cinema until everyone had left, to kiss and fondle in the dark.

I believed her gaze was my gaze, that she understood every depth of my existential sense of living by that gaze, as though I projected a hologram on to the glass of the window she viewed and she watched the playback of a movie I invented. She was cool. Cooler than the music that played over our heads. She had numbers on everyone. Every part of her was better than other girls. Even the way she hunched over for a moment to read her phone, the way she held her glass, the turn of her head... I was driven mad momentarily.

Have you ever felt like this? Have you? The dart had already pricked, what more could it do. The city became a park, a toystore, of clubs, bars, cinemas in which to amuse ourselves. The whole city was a directory of things which I could surprise and spoil Jessica with and make her happy and to have fun together. That's all I considered. I took it on-board like a responsibility of duty, as thought it was a great necessity in life that all other things were submissive to, Jessica, the great figure in my life that swung from the silver moon and walked on the beams of the sun, who at that time meant everything in the world and beyond to me, and all that was important was to be happy together another day.

I'd gone mad with it. Driven myself in to an obsession of devotion.

We lay on summer grass, under the full heat of July, swans and geese cooled off in the water, children passed with ice-creams, Jessica and I lay in arms kissing and running hands through our hair, cocooned in to desires, before an observant world which frowned and eyed with disapproval. We rolled apart and and felt our lips with fingers, and lay on our sides facing each other, staring in to each other as though the rest of the city was covered in sunlight and mist. We lay this way in heat for several moments before Jessica broke the silence, as though she struck a forked light through a humid summer.

"I'm going away next month," she said.

"For how long?" I questioned.

"A month," she said, and squinted her eyes looking at me.

I frowned and titled my head to pretend it was from the sun, covering my face with my hand.

"Why?" No other question occurred to me to ask.

"Daddy's taking the family," she replied, "and the place is so beautiful."

I continued to look at her. Lying there with the sun above our heads in the heat of Hyde Park, the still lingering flavour of her lipstick, together, I couldn't imagine how those words were true. But I could recognise the excitement in her tone. I didn't escalate my concern in to anything difficult and confrontational. And instead simply smiled and lay back on to the grass with her on my arm staring in to that brilliant sky watching a single cloud turn over in its shape as it crossed my view. It was one of the moments in my life I naively thought could last forever.

She'd be away for a month. I didn't know what I would do. All my thoughts circulated around her satisfaction and I'd become irritable and emotionally quickly offended, suspicious and insecure. Our relationship began to grow sore, wearisome and difficult.

Without her everything was quiet. A deepening silence that made my hot summer a frozen winter without excitement or interest. Nothing drew me outdoors, and all my thoughts revisited conversations and moments we'd shared. I looked at maps to visualise before me the distance we were. I made a mark on the calender to date her return and

made crosses every day, painfully edging closer to the last day. It became a mammoth endurance wherein I could neither speak or see Jessica at all, but only wait. It felt like a lifetime. I felt punished like being locked in a prison being unable to communicate with the outside world. It seemed to me that all the pleasant things of life seemed to flow from her and to be cut off was like being unable to breathe.

But eventually there was one more day. And it brought soothing relief to all the desperation I had to see her again. That singular, small, and finite 'one', was the most harmonious of sounds, it corrected all the discord of the twenty-nine days I'd experienced.

And I focused solely on that 'one'. I only had twenty-four hours to get through.

The day she returned, she had contacted me to say she wanted to come over right away. In my excitement, I announced to my parents as though it were updates on some breaking news story. They merely glanced at each other and smiled. And when the doorbell rang, I welcomed her with immediate kisses planted like freckles on a summer cheek, took her hand and lead her quickly upstairs with barely a moment for her to wave across the hall to my parents in the lounge room before we were ascending the stair case.

When we reached the landing, I was breathless in my excitement, looking at her as if I believed she would disappear in an unpredicted moment. She appeared bronzed by the Eastern sun, with a confidence without a word, a strength in her that seemed to hold her up, and a brightness in her eyes that suggested she had regained a rebirth of herself, somehow shed something which she had carried with her on her voyage and returned slimmed of it, as new as the first daffodils of spring. But I smiled at her, in her new confident radiance that made her seem all the more alluring.

"Come to my room," I said. And I led her, taking her hand, which I noticed did not wrap itself to mine.

Her manner confused me. She looked at me as if I were fading in to the dimmed light of the room, and in a moment would be somewhat irretrievable. I repeated my greeting in kisses and hugs. Wrapping my arms around her, smiling with satisfaction. But her kisses were as if accidents and she leaned away from my embrace. It was a dramatically sudden change as though all the heat in the room had gone cold and the fluster of our greeting only moments earlier had faded in to silence and stillness.

"What's the matter?" I asked laughing.

But she didn't laugh. Instead, she looked away from my face, walking a few paces aside, letting go of her smile and turned again to face me with a straighter expression.

"I need to tell you something," she spoke so softly it was almost without realising she had said anything at all.

"What about?" I asked having now stopped laughing and meeting her tone.

She didn't say anything.

"About the holiday?" I asked.

She nodded in response.

"I'm listening," I said without any warmth in my voice, but with an expectation of disappointment.

"There was a guy," she slowly spoke, "he was twenty-one, who was on vacation there too. He was nice, and kept making everybody laugh. Daddy took a liking to him and he was allowed to come with us to the party. We'd become friends. I didn't set out to..." she said. But was immediately broken by her crying that burst out as if they were themselves the following words.

"We were dancing..." she continued, "and I suppose the light and the music... I'd had a bit to drink, maybe that affected me too. And everything just came over me and..." She had paused.

"And what?" I insisted.

"And before I knew what I'd done..." she said, shaking her head, "I hadn't planned or wanted to."

"And what?" I insisted again.

"And we kissed. We began kissing. And I liked it."

I didn't speak, I just pursed my lips, tucking them beck inside my mouth to prevent from speaking. And swallowed. I took a breath but she continued as if to interrupt any approach of my first words.

"I'm sorry. It just happened. Things with us happened so quickly. And out there on vacation everything was new and exciting. All sorts of things can happen especially when everybody is having a good time. And we..."

And then it occurred to me through her tears that some larger part of the story was still unsaid and she wept less for the remorse than the damage it would inflict on me.

"Did you sleep with him?"

"It wasn't anybody's intention to do any wrong. Things just happened -" she continued.

"Just say," I remarked, "In words."

She half-turned her head away and raised her eyes to face me.

"Yes," she replied.

In that moment, all the fear, relief, and desperation that had mixed together desiring to tell the truth had arrived, and she fell in to the emotion of the moment. Every tear she had been holding back was let out and she sank in to their shudders that caused them trickling down her cheeks. I was frozen and simply watched the tears run down her cheek to the corners of her mouth as she swallowed them whilst she tried to explain between her sobs. I bit the back of my teeth together and my breathing quickened.

"I don't know what this feeling is," I said, "But I feel sick. And I can't look at you." I said breathing difficulty. I wasn't crying but I sniffed as if my nose had begun to run.

I'd managed to conjour in my mind all sorts of doubts and fears, re-envisioning smiles, remarks, glances, which I hadn't considered at an earlier time which now seemed to hold some concealed message that when put together revealed more of her true feeling which lay beneath. I was caught between this disillusion of this girl who I'd believed was incredible, who I could still believe was incredible and that I could see through this incident, for whom I could revive my feeling and desire for her and get through past this.

And the other feeling, a direct and poignant feeling of her careless betrayal and unlove. If I stayed, she would think my limits undoubtedly pushed back, and would only behave more cavalier with me if she believed my affection would not fail her, and then deceive and love me as she herself willed. No, this had already gone too far. I could not trust her again. And I could not love her anymore. A kiss can be quick and accidental, although emotions tied to it, but in sex, an entire disregard for another person must have come into play; and that one couldn't forget.

In time I'd realise she had lied about a lot of things. Things maybe to keep me happy, ironically to sort of spare me of some confusion and disappointment. But all that made things worse and to a larger effect made the outcome of the event even clearer.

I had created something that was more than the girl I knew. All my desires, frustrations, curiosities, admiration had manifested in my impressions of her as someone unlike the actual girl she was, which had become lost to my mind many months ago. The girl I saw on the balcony and the girl sat beside me listening to my music in the hotel event club that evening, that girl was the real Jessica, who I'd all but forgotten about, all I could see was my imagined perfect glorious Jessica who hoisted the sun which the world spun around, without faults except that she had reached her limits of perfection and had an inability to be any more perfect than she was.

We'd got wrapped up in all our complications of individual needs. And a new person brought all the freshness of a new day, clear of complexities, and everything was once again new and exciting with much to see curious of still and much unexplored. Someone who came in to her world and once again saw a real Jessica, even if it was only a brief once, it was not the one I dreamed up of her, and through his flirtations she experienced a shockwave of new and all the excitement that brought with it. The limited time of the vacation, the inevitable flight returning to London, made her desire to make a permanent act within the temporary moment of a passing holiday and to be cavalier with the transient encounter of two strangers who will never meet again.

That was really the end of us. We couldn't go any further. We'd met all the obstacles and successes, been through all the flirtations and appeared to have had all the best memories we were going to have. What seemed ahead of us were the exhaustive attempts to relive the old ones and pretending we could still make each other laugh and that we were truly the close people we had once been. Something about the electricity around us that brought us together and mixed us up perfectly in this world seemed to have gone. As though we'd lost it without knowing one night through a midnight open window. It was better not to allow it to fizzle out and create memories that were forced and clumsy which would be our last and clearest remembered. But whatever we had been it was over. Time and Life had made new plans, decided a new scene, and preferred to take our lives in new directions, and we together wasn't part of the new plot.

I accepted it coldly. The only thing we could be now was apart, and it was the best thing for us. What she or I wanted wasn't there to want anymore. There were new adventures, new people to meet, new people to make of ourselves. Unknown pleasures await, I simply did not know it at this point, and when it arrived I'd be so glad of it.

Everything had changed, of course, I'd stopped going to the hotel events every fortnight, and probably she did too. In retrospect, the months of that summer seemed to have lasted no longer than a day. I remember waking up the following weeks in a sort of stillness, unknowing how to move or what to do with the day, as though a desert storm had passed and I'd looked out on to the destruction of its path amazed and distraught. It was eerie, and I recognised a hole in my life that in time would sew itself together like a light cut, but at the time I didn't know if it would ever heal or disappear at all. My heart was a volcano beneath the earth, that though hot was unreachable, and I'd swim along buried fountains in a warmth known to me alone.

Where I am now I was glad that I was freed of the deformities of the emotional dramatic fluctuations of teenage life. Back then my emotions were catapulting in all directions, with the impossibility of being able to chose or catch a one of them. Before I'd managed to recognise I'd felt one, I'd felt another. They were like fireworks on November nights that splintered and shocked the abyssal night sky, teeming with explosions of

colours and sensation, and there was nothing to do but allow them all the freedom to leap in all directions like a bee in a glass jar. You're not ready to love until your hearts been broken a few times.

What happened to her? I don't know. She became something, married someone, wore white, I'm sure she'd wear white, if she got married, maybe has a child or two, she'd be good at that, someone later in time had swept her off her fet and been able to fly longer in the sky than I was able to and keep her there in the perpetual bliss of floating above the world like clouds on a summer afternoon.

All things end with parting. *

*

*

Choral Ode 2 A desert is an ocean of sand. An ocean as undrinkable as the desert. We go to what we do not see, to see it more clearly, and when we get there it is but still clouds and smoke what we did not expect to see – still further we go. The starry sky spins like a globe on its stand And upon our fate is it that we live unknowing. I, in this hour, and I forever.

Life is like a river, wherever there is a dead end it will find new open space to continue on until it meets the fated sea.

Life will be what it will be, and patterns work in everything. A crow does not pass without some pattern within it, nor bloody war, nor raging sea that swallows the land, nor blissful marriage nor mating beast. It is that which lowers the tides at morning and raises them in the evening.

We would talk until the sun grew tired of our verses, Trying to guess the path in a day-dream; it eludes us like trying to catch a beam of light that stretches out through the window. One thing is certain, it will take you where you neither dreamed nor imagined.

Life moves on. Let go. *

*

*

TWENTY-FIVE

Now the world pulls away from me in some wild unmerciful roll that I cannot draw back. School friends scattered around the continent, we will not meet again.

I'd gone to the arts university, to the disgruntled opinions of my parents, and was quickly wrapped in the pressure and demands of university life which grasped me breathlessly.

I was lost in a world much bigger than I had come to understand. Now competition, meaning, self, success, all created a circulation of pressures.

The city, once a vague and ominous canyon of granite and glass is now my studio, my lecture halls, my campus, so familiar to me I could be identified by my fingerprints on their doors.

I read the newspaper and I appear to have arrived in to the world in some great disturbance. I joined in student protests that I didn't believe in, I joined to shout my voice and to dance, as though it were a masquerade, as though we could change the world with a stomp and a song.

Many things came to mind which earlier in life I never thought to contemplate. The world seemed more of a chaotic world just when I thought I had grasped hold of it.

Things concerned me which hadn't occurred to me in the world were anything serious to consider. And not knowing their meaning meant the world took on a new colour and turned at a new speed. Suddenly I had to discover who I was in the grandest way. I had to make choices and mistakes and accept that my decisions became important realities. But there I was, out on my own, doing my own thing, trying to live the world my way.

This was my apartment, these my plates, my bed, my window, this my front door.

Here is central London, pummeled by cafes, here is the bustle, the hurry, where the isolation on the streets froths with the milk in the cafes. The streets pour with people in to the circling spoons of coffee cups, dissolving in to time like sugar in hot water. Lights from cranes hung like gods in the sky, making and remaking the cityscape. Here were the red lights of Soho, the neon sizzle that made ponds of colour on every pavement, we didn't step out of the light, like moths we followed lights and we walked most of the night through the centre of London. Here is Trafalgar Square with its fountains and great black lions. Here is is the Japanese garden in Notting Hill. Here is my art college tucked away behind the Albert Hall. Here is a restaurant in Camden by the river where I would eat lunch with a girl beneath the caterpillar trees that would fall on our heads. Here are the glamour girls of city-night life that buzz the streets like swarms of blue collar debutantes.

We took all backstreets, winding around quiet cobbled streets in the fake warm red lights.

Laughing and talking whilst the smell of cooking mated with the air.

Here were the lights inside the bars, the clubs, the music venues, the honey bee'd yellows, vibrant reds, and twisting blues and purples that flicker the walls all ascending from the shadowy black earth of its congregation. The music seemed to jump with its own life, as though we were inside the stirring (beating heart) of a larger animal that twitched in its waking. This, not the venue but the belly of some great elephant. The alarm bells. The electricity. The absurdities have overtaken me. I have lost myself in their working. Every moment was as though the stirring of some new beginning. The release of a wound cord. A white flash. Out of the shadows we danced. Our arms raised high above our heads only made visible by the shock flashes of white light that filled the building now and then revealing sun spots of trailing hands seen for seconds later after they had disappeared out of sight. Everything was vanilla, sweet to taste, soft like vanilla petals that flavoured the night and gave it its name. These night time city lights as we flowed between bright lights. We danced in and out of shadows, as lights floated in the sky, and colours came rushing fast past our eyes. We were lifted up by night's colours. A universe on the street, just like a galaxy. red stars and green spheres, above us and around us. Here came the lightning flashes, come to strip the humid night, setting fire to the stomachs of clouds. Flash. Flash. Energy everywhere alight. And the chorus of crackling clouds sang a few moments later. Darkness glowed, shining beams flood roads just like we remembered of those times in November. The night splintered in to a thousand fireworks, and overhead the fireflies suck in to the tar of the night sky sticking in their sparkle. We danced, stealing the sunset's light to be the dancers in the dark.

City sky line; city view; glass; sunset, silhouette scrapers; flowing water through the grand river. I stood rooftop, overlooking the city, unafriad, indestructable. I dropped a cigarette from the saddle of this stone, letting it whisp in to the altitude, ash and smoke trailing like tassels, watching it twist and spin as it fell below, flickering occasionally in the wind as though skimming the air, as though caught in an electricity within the clouds and traveled its forked route to the earth, disappearing out of view. The sun was disappearing then, sunk in to the mist behind the skyline. A dying orange mixed like watercolours in to the deathly grey. From the streets below trumpets could be heard, rising to my ears with the steaming smells from evening cuisine, whilst my eyes could see nothing but the sinking bulb that dimmed the light of day, and cast the city in twilight hues. Little lights flickered and the earth became the starry sky. A cold wind blew. The trumpets played on. Where did they come from?

Here was bar that overlooked the city on my twenty-fifth summer.

There is the woman in the black dress who stares at me from across the room. Who like us all was struggling to swallow all the pressures of work and life in the big smoke city. Tonight here she was swallowing drinks down. The rocks in the glass kept everything cool.

You staying? I ask If you have some money to spend, she says We talked art, exhibitions, artists, films, our sensations and ecstasies. We flirted with our passions as we unravelled our passions like desert ribbons let to dance in desert winds.

Her lipstick matched the wine. I'd been drinking enough by now that the world was unfocused. Lights and shadows in blocks like a cubist painting. She spun her glass, the wine span in rolls around its base like a light flamenco dress.

Tough, with lovers, loving with toughness. The waitress looked over and smiled to me as she walked the room. I wasn't interested. This woman had me tonight. Her manners.

Manners were always something I noticed and was taken in by, the way a woman moves, or rather, the way a woman animates herself. It was a second language.

We began flirting. Fooling around as though we believed in the naviety of our intentions. As though there were some correctness in the method of the spectacle, like a ritual announcement to make to our surrounding of what was about to happen and that the sky, sea, and land, had a matter of minutes to decide to be here or leave to more decent settings. The moonlight was a voyeurs. It gave us a full eye that didn't blink. The clock struck hours we couldn't tell.

I had passed my hand up her leg during conversation, without her flinching, not so much inviting as numb to an indifference, as though if anything it had arrived with delay I spoke in to her ear, cheeks to cheeks, so that we talked with our bodies nearly meeting. She spoke nothing that I remember, I was attentive only to any restriction of my movements, when I placed a hand, when I moved a little closer, the position of crossing bodies, her focus, her laugh, to slide to moments of meeting.

After talking cheek close, naturally I began kissing her neck, cheek and to the lips, as naturally as continuing a sentence. Swapping lips from top to bottom. Teasing, playing, biting. Tasting tongues of red wine. Soured only by her lipstick that tasted like fruit flavoured crayons.

The warmth of each leg against the other, stimulated our passion and was all the heat for our journey from the bar to the bedroom.

We'd arrived to her apartment nearby and behind a closed door we were leaning in, that lean as you give yourself over, as you bring another near to yourself, as you close your eyes, closing out your thought, your conscience, and become sensations, losing yourself in to the touching of lips, feeling the wetness of a tongue enter your mouth, as you feel your lips fall on to the lips of another like crashing wavings that hit the sand. As you express in the most delicate of sensations your passions and desires, where passion is given precedence to revive and express. During our kissing, I realised she'd already taken, already reached in to take hold of my piece and brought it out in the open room, the viewing walls, and I broke away from the kiss seeing her eyes staring in to mine as she continued repeatably stroking it with her hand. I responded by slowly feeling down her dress between the legs and circled her softly with my fingers. I leaned in to stroke my lips against her lips. We fooled like this in our foreplay, meeting each other with our lips as though catching ourselves passing in the wind. Our lips met and broke away, met and broke away. I smelled her perfume that traveled all the way to my brain. A flower, her cheeks and lips as soft as petals, her fragrance of flowers. Our clothes came off like autumn leaves that fall the branch. revealing the cold ribs of her body spread over like a bird's wing. I travelled my lips across her skin, letting them touch and kiss her. My hands on her back were like feeling nude statues, the smoothness of her skin and those peaks of shoulder bones that poked out from the curve of her back. I grasped and squeezed her breasts, her hips, her arms, her thighs. Her skin seemed to be hung on her wire frame. I was hungry just looking at her. This near skeleton of a girl. Soft skin, and lips so thin they could cut you to kiss. Her hair, as though dried in heat, waved in rhythmic curls. Our lips would kiss in collision, and our tongues seemed to dive like sea birds scooping fish in a mouth full of water. Sensation had taken over her body. Her currents of air energetically moved through her, she became warmer, and delicate touches became sparks which rippled across her skin. She moved to turn around and faced her rear towards me, and squeezing her ass-cheeks like fruit I began tonging her from behind like eating plums from the rock, it had the zing of summer cherries. I turned her around and lay her over on her back so I was face-deep in the softness of her flesh. I could have stayed there for hours with her legs flung around my neck. I wanted my tongue to explore inside like the unknown corridors through the labyrinth, running my tongue through every spot that would stir and shudder her to her fulfilling. She wet her bottom lip and with her tongue lightly pinched it with her top teeth. She lifted my head desiring to give in return, and she sat up and taking my piece in to her mouth, running her hand up and down as she bobbed and tongue-circled the head. I thought I'd lost her, disappeared in to a rhythm of her own bobbing. She had an aim for pleasure as if she wouldn't cease until I came. Her whole body seemed to lunge in to it, as though she were riding me with her mouth. I pushed myself up in to her in keeping with her rhythms. Her body had swallowed up my piece and I flew my fingers around hers, circling her clit, giving her sensations to stir and revive her as she grew with speed. I pulled out from her mouth and I lay over her, feeling her opening and slid myself inside. It went in to the hot embers of her inside, like a train through a tunnel approaching the heat of a fire on the other side, like diving in to those hot currents on the ocean floor heated by volcano rock beneath. Her soft moaning sounded sweeter than her talking. We started making it together. Gradually at first and then picking up speed and drive. It was hot and messy. Fumbling in the dark like scrambling out of a rosebushes. I was flesh landing on bones. What flesh I could grasp

from her legs, arms, breasts had become soft sponge in my hands, and I could feel the heat on my body that had been rising from her. She slid her hand from my back and held my behind as we drove on, pushing me to deeper pleasure, I ran my hand along her raised legs I was between, climbing over and over in waves of new thirst as though to drink was to become thirsty again, pounding as if trying to melt in to one body. Our hip bones collided, her chest was blushed at the lungs, and her pale skin was flushed pastel pinks and her eyes seemed to stare out in to a second space I couldn't reach. A volcanic pressure had arisen within us it needed to vent its release. I felt a desire to put out a fire inside.

Internally my impulses seemed to chant rhythmically and conduct my movements in their own desire. All the passion we had in talking and all our gestures was flowing now out in physical energy. We sought for exhaustion, for our whole bodies to become loose, as if with the omnipotent energy to reshape the mountains smooth. We were for a time no longer our names or identities, not the people we met earlier, now only bodies exchanging for the sole aim of fulfilling passion. We exchanged positions as if trying to invent some new step in lifting our ecstasies, hatching upon some unthought of method of twisting our bodies that we were the first to discover. Like the cable wires that followed along the roads that roll up and down in waves, our backs swung in their rhythm as we bounced to the same beat, twisting and turning in rolls, panting breathing in bursts, as though unable to breath in for the humidity of the room, through our breaths we couldn't speak. The sound was the slapping patter of her buttocks against my hips whilst we hit in reverse.

Loose sweaty wet hair and every limb was tender and her face was lost in to the throws of a thousand feelings stimulated at once. Half numbed by pleasure half desiring further. We were gonners at this point. We couldn't see each other as we were. We'd lost all identity.

Flesh moulded with flesh and all the grunt, slaps, slurps, hisses of the most ugly looking love had conquered us. We together were like a fire in a winter cabin, a centre heat to the whole room. She put her hands on the bed frame and repeatedly threw herself down on it.

Her thighs smacked my thighs as she landed in her dancing as she swayed her body over mine. It was ugly and sensational as though all the contrasts of the world met in the act and everything was made out of it. There was new thrill in this new girl, new thrill of a new body. We bounced off each other in wild desire. Limbs twisting, knocking hard and soft parts together. Shudders of pleasure seemed to ripple through her. In the last, she let out her finale. The waves hit the breakers, the roar of their impact and the sizzle as it hit the waters surface seemed to ripple, the penultimate wave of the storm before the settle.

The pressure welled up inside her and her moans became almost deeper as though low throated moaning leaped from her throat until her final aching wail that sounded as if her throat had shattered, combusting in to splinters of ecstasy. It was over. The sweat trickled from the base of my head, liquid falls from my brain, what is solid turns to water, plunges to the base of my skull. All things slowed and my body heaved in contractions, I felt to fall, dismantled, like a building blown from the base. My head was a wine glass of red that was spinning like the swirl before the swallow. How many lights curtailed my vision.

Flowing wine, flowing, in to the glass of my skull. The pillows of my lungs inflated. And like wave on wave of water, forcing rock to crumble to wave, I melt, and I melt. All heavy things were made light. Contractions squeeze and shake the earthquake in my chest, waves of morphine sting that trouble and worry. A moment blind from sight. My head was wine in a spinning glass. Morphine kissed my brain and sucked the good spirit from my flesh. My head was a spinning ball hit by a cue. Joyful sparks traveled my brain.

Radiance at last. Water dries to clay. The air in my lungs let loose. Feather-light. I am blown away by the wind. An ecstasy after was like floating in salt lakes.

I slept pleased with myself for a few hours until dawn seemed to break by the light that crept through the curtains and stirred me from sleeping. We slept in arms, her head rested on my bicep if only for the spectacle. I reached my hand over to stroke her hair, she brushed my hand away. The morning version was a tougher, colder, more distant version than the night previous. Almost with the intention of discontinuing any sentiments of the night before. The nightingale had gone, and the lark instead of being able to sing was shot dead with the indifference of two people to each other who had been so intimate only a matter of hours earlier who awoke in the same bed. She wasn't going to fool herself or be fooled that this was anything more than it was. I made an attempt to stroke her hair again “don't patronise me,” she remarked irritably “I'm not your girlfriend.” I was glad she said that. I had made a gesture for the spectacle. I was also disinterested. Who was this woman? This man? This space? We shared nothing, we were nothing. An emptiness existed and our act merely attempted to fill it. She was right to brush away my sentimentality. The event didn't eclipse the loneliness of the city or the vacuous relationships that are thrown together. It was just another spectacle; one of a thousand stories of the same kind. We knew it was only a joy for the night. To kill the fire and mock the day. To waste for the fun. It was throw-away sex. The pointless kind that meant nothing and that you don't forget. The kind of sex made frequently in cities. Like a shoulder struck by a stranger on the crossing of the station subway. It revived life for an hour. Passed the hours between sundown and sunrise, and gave a story for the morning. In the city, to love was an old dream. I reflected on how I'd made love to women before. The soft ecstasy of strong desire, as two people melted in to each other's passions. This wasn't love. There was nothing of love where the erotics of everything was a gift; a touch would be inflamed, a kiss would shiver the skin, everything was fruit, sweeter to taste, sweeter to feel.

"I'm going to go," I said She mumbled something in her stirring, but didn't raise, moving only to turn to her side and pull the covers around her more closely.

The morning was chilly and pearl blue light made everything some way between colour and grey. The birds warmed up their vocals. It was the anonymous hour. The street was still as though the world and everyone in it were caught in lost time. Early enough that the neighbourhood was unstirred, settled in to retirement of the activity of the day, sleeping somewhere between yesterday and today, and to walk through it was like walking through an abandoned fairground, whilst passersby were given ghostly acknowledgment like passing other visitors at a cemetery. I took a taxi home, I''d never been to the area she lived and saw no reason I would again. My feet were on tarmac, the engine now running in the taxi, the unfamiliar slam of a stranger's car shutting, "where to?" asked the driver. I directed him the long route home. I wanted some extra minutes to let time pass and recall myself a young man, singular, in this vast city, lost amonsgt the lonely and desperate hopes of millions of inhabitants that sped by anonymously everyday.

Our last words had been nothing but the mumbled music of goodbye forever. Gone was the girl, gone like the day before the eyelids close in to a deep sleep; lost like dust into dust, a handful of sand dropped into a desert, a breath in to the wind, a shadow in the darkness. Gone; a transient love, like passing clouds that shape sublime for a moment and

disappear in to new forms. Indecipherable at the speed they travelled from one object to the next like passing trees on the road side travelling across the country, no different than one hill from the next.

I wanted to be out of London. To see my country, to see the fields where no concrete met them. There was an impulse to be on the current. As if for a moment to become wind, or racing waters, to be like nature, to twin with her and the flux of the entire universe. To on the road with its golden glitter that flew past like sparklers on November nights. To racing under that blue like the ocean sucked into the sky. And that long grey, everlasting grey, white lines along the rim. In the cool of the wind, and the heat of the sun.

But I was stranded in the pace of the city.

Examinations, graduation, interviews, my first day of work.

Now I have appointments, I must wear this shirt, I have cleaned my shoes - I have become the men I mocked as a teenager - I must arrive early to everything and seem eager.

Here were the art rooms filled with anonymous art collectors, people kissed cheeks, waiters brought champagne on silver trays with accidental smiles, the artist gives a presentation of their work from behind a table to a well-dressed audience. The exhibitions left me tired, they began to feel distant and inhuman. I wanted to explore, even in this room, I wanted to explore, like when I was younger when I would visit the Muse d'Orsay and travel from elements of time, turn a corner and I see a landmark of history like great mountains, it was a kind of well-dressed waiting area, conversations was inebriated, reduced to remarks, nothing made sense of why I was there. I'll never forget that night I ran across the city without a care to be seen, to please and tire my legs, I ran, and ran, until the night caught up with me.

The clothes did not suit me. I began not to recognise myself and felt I was drawn in to chasing all the desperation of my peers.

There comes a time in your life when there are no rules, when you feel to be the capital city of your own conscience. When what is true for you is true for all the world.

When your thought is the undiscovered gold of California, and only you have the permit to the mine.

But I am mid-way, I am twenty-five. Still with the uncertainty and hopes in front of me. My life is still the child of its own world, I am still on the first roads of my adventures, still to be swept on to unknown voyages. I will make attempts, discover, I will not decide, I will try and fail and try. And eventually I will know. That this one is my calling. This is my world. And toss my hopes out in to the world to see where they will land. In my twenty-fifth summer am filled with a delighted anticipation of what is to come.

I wanted to be out of London. To see my country, to see the fields where no concrete met them. There was an impulse to be on the current. As if for a moment to become wind, or racing waters, to be like nature, to twin with her and the flux of the entire universe. To on the road with its golden glitter that flew past like sparklers on November nights. To racing under that blue like the ocean sucked into the sky. And that long grey, everlasting grey, white lines along the rim. In the cool of the wind, and the heat of the sun.

Here is the northern country. Here are the great tall fur trees, with chimneys nestled within, here the great humped hills, the damp green earth, the ponds and lakes drawn out by the rain fall. Here is the lump of earth, the northern country. Here are the farmers'

fields with little steeple towers, here are the red bricks, grey bricks, earth bricks, here are the hills like kneaded dough, here are the stone walls and woolly fields. Here the bright blue sky hovers overhead. Here are the red bricks of Manchester, here is the stone crescent of Buxton. Here is the stream that runs through the valley and the stream that dances down the stone steps. Here are the old cotton mills, the wool mills, the breweries, stone boxes with chimneys for spires. Hill sloped houses hidden in sleepy hills.

*

*

*

Choral Ode 3 We lived as though the world were a nonsense dream. We are youth who know nothing; We lived as if there are no great lessons to be learned, in all fearlessness and freedom.

Lost in the waves of the motion of life. Lost, lonely, dissatisfied, in the vast chaos of life, fueled with the urge for emancipation, freedom, restlessness. Life had become true again, as though it came embarking over the red horizon of morning. Death to us was a vanishing dream like a mirage in a desert. And all life tasted of vanilla.

People passed in and out of my life with obscurity. Like coal burners on the steam ship, shoveling coal in to the furnace once more igniting the fire with a new brighter flame. People arrive, lit up my world and passed as though there were no grip to my life, but simply a smooth frictionless surface that let nothing stick. And then, like echoes, people sunk in to the further corridors of my life.

Through aging years; the past disappears, gone, sank in to time, dissolved like sugar in hot water; irretrievable and lost; sweet sugar's youth, a vanilla history, sweet to taste.

Memories of youth on ageless spots like phantom ghosts playing somewhere between the real and the unreal. From where we cannot reach and plummets we cannot venture deep, but staring in to the great goodbye.

But that was life; the incessant to and fro. We were bystanders in the great abyss, ready to be knocked by the heaving tide. Sank in to the mystery of some stillborn universe.

Buried and arriving, buried and arriving, like boxes that floated somewhere on the Indian ocean. *

*

*

THIRTY-SIX

We were married the same year your father died.

France brought with it altogether different skies. The rainfall made the clouds at sunset blushed in peached pinks. We sang and danced through those summer nights.

We would have arguments when we would need each other, but express ourselves in detest and hurt each other, shedding thin emotion like shaking feelings that didn't belong to us. You shouted at me in French. And I laughed.

You shouted more. I couldn't understand a word. You laughed. You shouted in English and slammed the door.

We laughed so much, we were a distraction to everything.

The first day we took our children to school, I missed them, the moment they left our side, I could still see them, I said goodbye, have fun, and God I missed them already, they were still in front of me and I missed them.

Sometimes I hated that we lived by the mountains and the sea, near so few people, I conflicted with the chaos of London had grew up with, but the mountains and the sea, that distant space. Late morning plains that suck the noonday sunlight, and pillow white clouds that mould and remould theirselves in the hands of the wind. The shoulder, hip, buttock, of the lying green woman that makes up the landscapes distant hills. She who lies in bed nude in white sheets when I wake, she reappears in the same hills as I travel.

Some Rodin masterpiece is made in cloud forms, transient, perfect for a moment, lost in the wind, my eye caught it before it unfurled slowly in the hurry of the wind to recreate anew. Perfect for a moment like the mystic shadows of some ancient stone circle. I imagine I could put my fingers up in to that blue sky and stoke them like the water in a bath; the clouds, your bubbles; your curved figure, the hill.

White birds danced in pairs above us, to me the size of a pocket pin, like paper taken up by the wind, as though without wings they travel on a current of air, like a warm summer heat that rises and takes up the lighter contents of the earth, in graceful flight they danced above our house. I do not know where they come from or where they go.

Whilst the leaves seem to murmur amongst themselves.

Life sends me women like winds experienced on a high cliff. Some they come and hit hard, some I feel not at all, and on rare occasions one hits me to lift my feet clear off the ground. You are my rare wind, and me, without the force to stop you. You gave me hope for myself. Do you know that I am speaking to you? That these words are your words?

You were interested in traveling and finding those secret secluded hideaways on the stretches of beaches, the type you find if you go searching for hours in the rocks, where you climb up the slippery wet steep rocks that hid secret nests of sand and sea where the tide still nestled low, you find a beautiful untouched beach with its own private pool, and unspoiled plants, but stay too long and the whole beach is covered in water again and your rocky exit is swallowed up by the tide, like a pearl in the closed mouth of the oyster.

We have an intimacy that is dangerous. I look at you and I don't know what is happening. Sensations flutter through me, my breathing cut short. I am out of breath. I have done nothing but think of you.

We all got up with our drinks in our singing whilst Goncourt played on the piano the American songs we learned when we were younger

Callin' for you, baby, do you see the road?

Livin' with each other is living in hope.

Time won't change the leaves.

Through life all my pains have been thrown on the stack.

I take what I've been given and never looked back.

The day is kept for wasting and I'm not staying for the praying

'cause the rooster's calling up the new morn'.

Callin' for you, baby, do you see the road?

Livin' with each other is living in hope.

The storm, began a breeze..

I never thought I'd know you like I know you now, An' never saw you coming up over the brow.

But you hit me and I'm spinning, there's no slowin' down So I've learned to dance the rhythm.

(But tell me that you love me now and then.)

Callin' for you, baby, do you see the road?

Livin' with each other is living in hope.

Your smile sets me at ease.

All this dreamin', oh, and oh, I see it coming.

All this screamin', oh, and oh, I hear it calling.

Listen to me,baby, I am forever in an hour.

When I'm with you, I'm no longer my wrongs.

(But tell me that you love me now and then.)

Callin' for you, baby, do you see the road?

Livin' with each other is living in hope.

She dreams and still believes.

That was the afternoon the storms came, we'd set out in blinding sunshine. The water ran down our faces, for every drip that fell two more fell to us. We grabbed what we could, laughing, stuffing it all inside the hamper with your shrieks as the cold rain kissed your back, and fled to shelter under the empty cricket stands, catching our breath and laughing. And an old man sat at the far end of the stands, with no expression, just an empty look within a silvering beard.

"I think the food's ruined," I said, turning back to you.

"I think the picnic's ruined," you said gleefully.

I laughed.

"Do you have the wine?" I asked.

"Oh no," you gasped in bubbles of giggles.

We looked out on to the field and saw it nestled in the grass getting beaten by the showers, and then looked at each other, laughing.

I said "I'll go get it" and I ran in to the field, with the rain coming down on me without a care of it in the world.

What can I express in this tone this feeling for you? I feel somewhat I have betrayed you. It is there tucked away somewhere in the heat of my mass of atoms. There you are, merged with me in a way I cannot express. I have deceived myself to feel for you. It is a shadow of itself in the elements of my soul. I have known new intimacy with you. Of the more subtle and delicate kind. Of the kind that no explosion of attraction that we demand

in our interests of social relationships desire, an attraction to come bursting towards us undeniably, we want to be sure, to be taken over by our love as though it comes to us in convictions. But you, from the start, delicately, subtly, a rain drop that sinks through the length of the glass at my window, that is how you arrive. And in its very weakness, arriving with no force at all, I am taken.

But where are you and what are you doing? That's all I want to know. I don't know why I want to know, but it will please me to know.

I feel with you. I feel what you feel. Like those who in their religious ecstasy wept at the sensation of their icons. We too let tears fall when our lips meet.

To kiss you it is sore. Your kisses make my body sore. As though your lips are lined with sharp blades that shocks and tingles the body. Every time I kiss you I want to weep. I want to cry, to let fall the tear from the corner of my eyes that wishes to leap, like some boy running to the cliff edge to jump in to the sea that awaits in open arms towards his future life. My tears want to leap from my eye - whom is to catch it. Or will it run from my face to no frontier but to hang from my chin like a raindrop on the winter guttering to drop to earth to be forgotten.

With you I am better; I become larger, I am a greater version of myself the moment my lips meet yours, all the passion I have stored in me flows out in to you. All my ecstasies and sensations are exchanges in tongues, saliva, and lips. Every little delicate part to touch you sends shivers, to stroke your lips with lip, to touch your hand with hands, to stroke nose with nose, and meet cheek with cheek, and brow with brow. I do not kiss you with my mouth but with my whole heart. I feel it exhale at our kisses in satisfaction. I am overwhelmed the moment we meet.

When you are not around I kiss fruit in remembrance of you. Your lips broken in to like my teeth crushed in to an apple, sink in to a pear, with all the sweetness of plums, and your tongue the tang of raspberries.

When I am with you, intimate, we fall together like surges of water thrown together, like water pouring over separate cliffs of great heights and meeting together to mix in the fall to join in the lake below. When I'm lying beside you I want our waters to mix becoming one. That sets the world right. We are wiser than all life, which has not yet discovered the blissful workings of how we live privately and learned yet to make cities in this way, make nations, and make continents. We love as though we have uncovered some profound discovery which would cure all the miseries of mankind that has plagued it for centuries. A plethora of people have described these sensations; but they hadn't loved you, so I think I am describing it in the most beautiful way yet conceived, because no one has loved more or had the capacity to love as I am required to, because I love you.

The populated world looks to us with innocent curiosity; what is this on display taking place? They witness to what we cannot witness. Like young children looking to a neighbour's field at the secrets hidden in the end field. This, we seem to call back in our exultant actions; is us. Uncontrollably us. Like fire set to trees in dry forests, we are lit and burn brighter the longer we are aflame.

I love waking before you, watching you stir, having slept in one of my shirts, that hangs oversized and loose on you like a thin cotton blanket. In the morning, when your body has regained its softness. In the morning when we feel lethargic and numb restored with painlessness and energy and make love all over again.

That blissful activity that just raised higher and higher like the sun shot from the

mouth of the morning mist to peak in the noon day heat. We reached our two o'clock heat, our afternoon ecstasy. We leaped and bounced, throwing ourselves in to each other, verbal language had fallen in to breathing sounds, everything was communicated in breaths and body heat. Our pleasure was the same, and rose the same, and turned the same. We chased after each other's higher sensations, throwing ourselves at each other as though the meeting of our bodies were feet that ran faster across open land running for the next thrill.

There was no end until pleasure met exhaustion. We were like a marshall on the fox hunt, determind, using all sense and skill that with experience had become instinct to hunt out the next forward gallop. Our rhythms became entwined in to locomotive mechanisms that repeated propulsion without tire. We could not separate as though magnets lay within our bodies unable to be brought apart. Our physical bodies had felt to drop all skeleton to become supple muscle and skin, like oils and paints dropped in to water that twisted and stretched like wax lava lamps. Breaths became moans, pleasure brimmed to demand its overflowing, still we charged on like speed boats that bounce the sea waves. We were miners in the cave that came for gold and wouldn't leave for the greed.

Our thrills met like two waves on a stormed sea that threw themselves together, like the plates beneath the earth that rucked up against each other and threw new rocky mountains in to the world. We arrived at our climax like we were the first to arrive there.

And our bodies finally felt to spin and twist around each other in spirling lifts that shot to the sky. Then the earthquake, the whole shudder of our bodies like our souls tore from our mortal flesh to be enraptured together on some unreachable astral plane.

Then came the silence, as the whole world reappeared and all that could be heard were our final desperate breaths.

The end of our days always ended with a shower. The tingled pleasure like beads of sweat that prick and tickle the skin like thorny plants, like white pine, like cacti spines, that needed steam and water to wash away. If silence could echo that is the first sound when you have left me. A reverberating nothingness. The first sounds of the world without you again are echoes of silence. A depth to the world where I cannot reach for you. Like mountainous glaciers I cannot ascend. To live without you is to be enslaved to live.

*

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Choral Ode 4 Life now flutters by fast and seems to leave too soon, like sunlight through the wind-spinner. Life clings because it sees its flight. In youth life was possessed without concern to its flight. When life feels to be fleeting, it clings stronger. So tightly does it wrap about me and swim under my skin that I feel the vessel of my body to be in a frenzy.

I have had long ago my last grieving. Our entire life is a youthfulness that goes unrecognised We are what we do not think, We are part of what we do not know. What was part of the whole is whole again. To live and die are one and the same. I am the circumference of infinity. I, in this hour, and I forever.

We experienced the pain, anguish, sorrows of life and rekindle our love for life.

Only the transient phenomena of the world fell from our visions, the eternal continued to reblossom. We were living like immortal ghosts, in death still part of the whole in the circumference of eternity.

In the face of it all, in all circumstance, all you can do is live on until the very end. In the face of my danger, I called for danger to stand with danger. pour water in to the sea and it becomes one; let loose a handful of sand in to the desert. Troubles are trifles when dangers stands with danger. pains are lessened when pains are broader served, he suffers less where suffering is all.

I’ve seen the eternalness of myself, I have seen my own death-face, my own chattering bones, seen the teeth of my skull talk. I have succumbed to the vanilla fragrance and therein I have seen myself most clearly. I have seen through the pale ghost, the wind-wafted sheet of my own phantom, I have seen the costume of my bones, these veins, muscles and skin that clothe my undergarment of marrow; I live in my pumping organs and my digestion. Still beautiful do I look dressed in these alone. I look at my tongue and know it is not real.

But to man, what is there but pain, fear, injustice. Life is discord after discord, trouble after trouble, fear after fear. Rolling waves of strife, old woes give way to present woes: that is life; and it is man’s work to make it harmony and the outcome is ever more discord. Strife, the substance between all things.

I exclaim what comes to me but ill-fate, all that is unworthy of my life’s struggle and pain. But one has an instinct to life even in an inevitable call of death.

Exhale. *

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SIXTY-ONE The morning was rising. The white mist spray of the rising clouds streaked the sky, illuminated by the rising golden bulb, rising out of the womb of the sky. That was the colour of the world; rusted and ancient. It was becoming autumn, and every plant seemed tired, revealing tanning leaves from the summer spent.

I was old now. The morning mist was not the same now as the sun rises, white , like the steam in the sauna of some great hotel. My eyes cannot see the view, the sun itself too bright to see the ocean from a distance. All in the distance is a da vinci blue, and the boats on the horizon before me are silhouette. White lines streak the sky from passing planes, the slow breeze strokes my face. I cannot see the view for the glare of the sun. Like police lights on troubled nights, like hospital lights, like photographers' cameras on some reception dinner, like unknown car lights on some long journey across the country, like the sun that was my only memory as a child.

I do not believe anyone in the world has tasted life as I have bitten in to it. Has kissed,

and fought, and loved it as I have.

Life, what waters we swam. Our adventures made many friends. What we accumulated in our roving, whilst too there are names from episodes we cannot venture back. Time has taken them, and held them to the bosom of the past. Remember when we were young, as new to the world as the ivory blossom, and ran among the long grass in the abandoned fields in the countryside. Through the grass we ran. All youth is summer in the memory.

Here was the shoreline with its incessent rhythm.

These slow flowing waves I witnessed on the shoreline, that roll in peaked crests towards me, these were waters that drew towards me, under sunrays that warmed and coloured my skin.The sunlight that wrapped me as I returned to waves of the sea.

Wherever I looked there was water. I was not at the shore. I swam in the sea, and the waves came right up to me, sweeping my head, each time they gradually approach, rose and fell, lifting me in the next lunge of a heaving wave. I swam, sun-down beneath the water's loose surface, in to the heaviness of the sea. Underwater my ears stopped to the sound of playing voices on the shore, of shouting in the sea's water, I could see nothing but a vague blue, it was murky not like the swimming pools of my childhood. All was quiet except a slight rumble of sounds that could not travel through the density of the water. I wanted to hear the whole ocean in that sound, but it was only a muffled rumble, a sort of started silence. I pushed out my cheeks and came up for air. I was in the waves, the sea, the waves, the sea, as they fold and unfold. I inbreathed the sunlight on my surfacing body wholly in to my chest and flowed a tan reflected in to the water's mirror. The sunshine stayed on the water like a bouy on the harbour, rigged up with chain and anchor.

The wind was keeping the waters rattled and the sunlight made a glowing path out to tomorrow.

The great whales swam with the great ancient mammoths. The dead and dying take their journey with me, many of whom I've needed to live. In the end, death it is not black.

Death is transparent. Like holding up a glass glazed with morning mist. That is death, clean and clear as the stones of diamonds. I hold up my glass and look through its transparency. I cannot reach through beyond the glass, I cannot see clearly, but look how it lives on, despite that I cannot see, smell, hear, or touch what is within. Death is a glass house.

I watch the sun above and it is already historic, an ancient sun that is visible today.

Nothing holds, and even seas give up their dead. I kept still, letting the waves brush away again and again the sand from my skin. I let the momentum of waves run up against me, being heaved through its great movements. What the waters take with them and what they leave behind.

Once the wave comes, like a shadow over a hill, to close my eyelids, that wave moves on returning me, in my contributions that are carried on that moving wave, like the motions of the sea in which waves leave and return, leave and return. And as it moves these things mix with new born things. On and on in the swells of the waves.

Everything passes from one thing to another. The clouds passing from one form in to another. The ice touched by the sun becomes the flowing spring. The city too will fade and transform and change, its costume will redress, and its sensational inventions, like everything else with generations, and the breeze comes through to announce the curfew, making a new world out of an old one, not forgetting that all things pass and even old

things fade in to new things. But everything happens at the right moment. Every flower and fruit has its season. Travelling towards some unborn day. Time, ever pregnant with new things.

Life lives on and I must make a contribution. That is the worth of life. That it is not in vain, not that I look to myself alone, old, not that all is to be had for my gain. Beneath my exit, there is continued life. I live, and make my contribution during my brief appearance, whether art, or deed, or child.

I now have a new liberation. I wake tomorrow to a new journey, and as a new man. I wanted all the woes I must endure over that space; all the battles and miseries I must live through; all the pleasures and joys. At that moment I saw a wave fold on the horizon as a wave folds on the shore. Adventures have begun which I may have barely even noticed. A new adventure, and in my boast, now swings my heart renewed.

The sunlight sparkled and glistened the ocean's chest, and wherever light landed it bounced from one wave to the next as little crests arose and fell across its surface. The sound was a soothing hushing like the sea tried to quieten the fading voices of children that sprang from around the shore, rising up in to the thick blue sky that grew white around the sun.

The clouds turned overhead, the sun moved through the sky, I stared back to you on the shoreline, staying the waters in the flowing waves, remembering moments in my life through my ages, as though in a mesmerizing dream.

*

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Choral Ode 5 The world is continuingly blossoming and transforming; all the seasons in one day.

The year will pass its movements, handing over tomorrow from today. All things in place are moving at once, and each finds its own room, allowing each season In its turn to bloom. A leaf falls. A sun dies. A hand cups a water that does not stop to be dammed.

Time. Timeless age of the city street; footsteps through the stone steps and the markets, city-street chatter that flows through passages and alleyways, not known but in their hour amongst men and women to be known forever. They pass and pass through the city streets, talking in the dusty heat, mere phantoms of time. Lives a million ages have seen before; faces that Time remoulds to make again; and in Time’s inspiration invents new men, and new women, unknown to us before who belong both to their time and to all time; whom that brief hour of their life would name a century.

Time: takes lives, heals hearts, brings the seasons and the tides, turns the constellations in the sky, brings fortune and glory to men, and drops them to wretchedness. For time doth come to test our toil. In change we must not be rigid. We walk through life blind-folded to paths naĂŻve and we must go by ignorance to what we have not yet been.

I stand in passing sunlight, In flutters of passing shadows‌ When all things turn to ashes, all things at their appointed hour, through the ever flowing present.

JAMES

ANDERSON'S

VANII IA