LOVE IN THE ONSET OF SENILITY
Time was important once. And I wore a watch
then, just to know. And the watch held to my ear and I could hear the seconds
dropping, like a tap dripping or like pennies thrown in a well to buy wishes; and I counted
them sometimes and my breath slowed and I was briefly still and my thoughts
still. Then like a bee and minutes fizzed in my hands and I was in a hurry to
be where I was going.
‘Take your time growing old,’ my mother
said to me once.
And once there was a girl and her name is a
silver sound to me now, no shape just sound, like whistling or a song when it
is hummed, and she took my hand and it was everything and enough. Though years
have run under my feet since then, yet I return to that time, like turning back
clocks, and I reach into the air and I feel her hand in mine again, always in
mine. Sometimes I wish she would let go, but she doesn’t.
And I read somewhere, something about
happiness, and how we are undone by memory and hope, and one or both takes us
away from the moment we are in, and so we miss the thing that would make us
happy. It was Søren Kierkegaard I think and he said
being busy was missing the point and the moment.
So I sit in this room, cross-limbed on
the floor, and I empty my head of all thoughts, so I am nothing but the here
and now, feeling the air on my bare skin and my cock limp, and my every breath
in and breath out. And something leaves me then, so I am lighter, light as
nothing and floating. And time stops or turns cartwheels away from me, and
seconds are as long as hours and hours brief as moments. And if not happy, then
not hurting, but also not anything.
Yet there is always the coming back
to ground and my first thought when I do is my hand reaching back to hold her hand. And I
think then that Kierkegaard has it wrong, for holding that girl’s hand in
memory and I am happy remembering. And a hundred other happy moments held in
that hand, fizzing like bees.
And the clock on the mantelpiece
counts out the minutes, doles them out like pennies dropped in the cups of beggars
or tossed like a handful of change at a wedding and children rushing to pick up
those rolling coins.
And a woman I don’t know says I should
put some clothes on or close the curtains at least. She looks at me blankly and
she says my name; and if I am not mistaken, she says it fondly, though I don’t
know why she should. And all my thoughts are scrambled so that I do not know
when I am or where, except there’s a girl and her name is a tune or a whistle
in my head, and she holds my hand still, I am certain she does, and it is everything
and enough and always.
