The Ghent Review Volume1, Number 1, summer 2016 | Page 57

Biblical facts that are not facts and yet are more than that. Names. Sticks
and stones to beat a dog with. Will not break me.
Cross the street again. Dart down this lane. Emerge into the flushed silence
of a square. Yes I am flushed. Of pocket only not of mind. I don’t mind. My
future will replenish me. I the replenished. Now and in what will yet be. the
future’s shadow already upon me. The shadow before me circling to become
the shadow behind me.
That future has passed.
The particular not the general. That still waits as I stride to meet it. Street
after street. No somnambulist I. now in my future’s beginning.

Now by water and weeping trees.
I will not weep. Didn’t when it was required of me won’t do so now.
Not mine the tear-drenched eye-lash. Clear-eyed to the world.
Not for a pittance will my soul lie down.
Neither by water nor pasture nor bridge.
Bridge I must cross. Uniting what it separates. Another symbol there if
symbols be needed.
A bakery. No meringues. How fortunate that my poverty is not emphasised
by abundance.
A small good-bye before the larger goodbye. A promise to the future.
A promise to the self.
-Yes he told me he met you – last Tuesday it was, outside the post office,
and that he saw you later that same day by the main door of the library but
he didn’t know if you were going in or coming out as you didn’t appear to
have a book in your hand – as if that was their only purpose I said but as
usual he didn’t know what I was talking about so I left the matter stand as it
stood and was on my way.
Cheerio!