Gruff, snuffling, you poke around the
towpath like a dog, marking out the territory of the morning. Your sinews are carpeted with layers:
T-shirts, a fleece and wood-worn jacket, two scarfs and a cap. Your skin hasn’t seen sunlight in years. These incongruous Birkenstocks, large to fit
socks two or three thick, have gathered the same weather as the lines on your
face. On your single ringed stove, a
copper kettle sings, and you make yourself a pot, stirring the leaves,
stirring. Your eyes swivel, sharp,
looking for a hole to tear through, a wavering to be demolished by your
certainty. At only four feet and eleven inches,
you have boiled your powers down to a salty essence.
Inside, in the dark, peeling palace
of your memory, lie shelves stacked with books of photographs, each of them
labelled with a meticulous hand. Here are the
awkward and abandoned children, the worried girls-soon-to-be-mothers, the
uncles with their broad whiskers and boyish eyes, the mothers raising wan smiles by washing lines, the workmen bearing their labour in their bodies, each
with a glass-eyed anonymity, and those strange ones, the ones too good for the mould,
who made mischief for everyone and whose feathers shone like rainbows, now levelled, like the others, by the acid of time passing.
Now, with the old ones gone, you keep their memories by your judgement,
numbered prisoners trapped in your gossamer shells.
You cling to them, these faces, memorise
their names, draft invisible charts of their progeny. Soon the remembering of them is the only
truth you have, a truth that fades, yellows, and cracks, and the more you grasp
for this one or that, the more they crumble and dust in your swollen fingers.
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