Well, we took a stroll. Hands thrust in our pockets to avoid the temptation of what we had become accustomed to on our walks--the usual holding of hands and caressing of fingers as topics flowed unhindered by shame or ignorance. And we maintained a more than an ordinary distance; didn't let our shoulders touch. And the conversation turned from the TWA aeroplane disaster as we passed through the park gates and on to the subject that we were compelled (by proximity and circumstance) to discuss. Why the distance? And why the tension?

Let's be blunt; cut to the chase; let it all out: she was leaving me to go back to an ex who used to rough her up. Let me tell you, that news roughed me up.

The walk ended with a visit to the pub and several pints of Guinness doctored by her tears, yes, her tears. The slow wind home brought us to the final stage of the night together: the walk home and the parting by the doors: apartments A and B, of the same house, of the same street.

Slam. Creak, Slam. Her door closed marginally after mine.

I've been reading tonight and thinking about poems which are rather appropriate to all this. Forgive, I feel compelled to share this with you. The first is by Wallace Stevens. He wrote the poem, "The Man With the Blue Guitar" that I read to her just a few weeks ago. This poem, seems to contain the right sentiment that I'm searching for at this moment... read...

Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu

That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,
Just to stand still without moving a hand.

In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold.

To be one's singular self, to despise
The being that yielded so little, acquired
So little, too little to care, to turn
to the ever-jubilant weather, to sip

One's cup and never to say a word,
Or to sleep or just to lie there still,
Just to be there, just to be beheld,
That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell.

One likes to practice the thing. They practice,
Enough, for heaven. Ever-jubilant,
What is there here but weather, what spirit
Have I except it comes from the sun?

It's a beautiful poem, I think. The ideas contained within it are too dense for me to explore fully in this short essay and in this fragile mood but I do feel that the image of waving farewell without moving a limb... it's so real... it's all I can really do... isn't it? I'm waving. This minute, I'm waving. Farewell... farewell, repeating "farewell" in every sense of good- bye and good-luck on the voyage and safe landings: farewell. Can she feel it?

And while the water carrying time over the last two days has been swift... far too swift for my liking... too swift to even see or count the number of bridges that it's been carried under, I know some have passed. And tomorrow the torrent will have slowed some more. And while today I see the TV, poems, people, all things, conspiring against me, tomorrow, perhaps, I'll begin again to see as William Carlos Williams saw when he wrote

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

But this is the ultimate achievement for someone in my state... in vision, anyway: to detach one's self from interpretation; to achieve or at least attempt objectivity. It's a shot at seeing the world despite the emotion that's inherent in the moment... in every moment... to know that all things matter equally. The same man wrote, touchingly, another poem that I've read to her:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

But because it's touching, this poem, written with the same goals as "The Red Wheelbarrow" fails in its attempt at objectivity. It's a shot at the same, but there's so much underlying the image... no, the reason for this poem's writing is that he's done something wrong; he wants to apologise; he's offering an explanation... a justification... something, but it's not an objective poem for at least this reasonand he has a chance of redemption... absolute redemption; after all, he's not really done anything that wrong. Has he?

Which brings me back to Wallace Stevens. I wonder if she remembers my reading her the "Man With the Blue Guitar"? It's long, so I'll just quote a couple of stanzas here:

The Man with the Blue Guitar

1
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
you do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.

The key in this first stanza, at least as it seems to me, is in Stevens' apparently perplexed quest for an understanding of the need for homogeneity in the imagination of the reader; we must all (it seems "they" are asking) see things the same way; smell things the same way; feel things the same way... we must have things as "they" are telling us, the way "they are". "Impossible", replied Stevens, "things are not the way they seem they are":

2
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can. ...

17
It is the sea that whitens the roof.
The sea drifts through the winter air.

...

The sea is a form of ridicule.
The iceberg setting satirise

The demon that cannot be himself,
That tours to shift the shifting scene.

And it's the shifting scene that's so important in this poem. The inevitable subjectivity of the moment... the moment that is so, so, very tenuous. We think we know what we have seen... we tend to think that the red wheelbarrow, glazed with rain water, is so very important... or I think so... but does she? Do you? Will I tomorrow? It's a shifting scene and changing perspective that Stevens extemporises by exposed emotion. Each moment is subjugated to the next, falling (first to its knees then flat to the floor) before the next and the next. And so we see tragedy today and humour tomorrow and birth and glory and happiness and sorrow and what-ever else the next day. But we see it. We do see it. And you know what's strange? You know what's strange? We feel it. We always feel it. And that, if anything, is the weakness in the rationalist's shell. It's always feeling that spoils the objectivity of the scene. You, me, who-ever else, will never see the same way... never... because we feel differently and yet, futile though it may be, we try... we try to see things the way others do, and we try, and we try when we should

32
Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.

Things never are the way they seem they are. Not on the blue guitar... not on any guitar. Not ever. They just are the way they are.

But, and this is a big but, we will always see them the way we choose to see them. I was going to quote a poem from Irving Layton but it's too depressing. Basically though, it's about his cat which is dying. He takes it outside and lays it on the grass. He watches, through the window indoors, as it takes its last breath. And then what seems another last breath. But is it another? Or is it the indifferent wind fluffing its coat? For the reader, it should not be important as to what really is... it should be important to know what the speaker thinks; for the speaker of the poem, that naturally occurring Schrodingeresque paradox is everything--this is a conclusion that Layton doesn't make that too clear for his reader. He implies that it's just the wind making the cat seem to breath... just as the wind throws a twisted leaf between the cat's limp paws (as if it were playing); it lets the wind fluff the cat's coat and makes the speaker believe it's still breathing, still playing; that it's something that was suddenly becoming again... maybe. Layton leaves it to the reader to decide which way to interpret the scene... to hope, for himself, the cat either dead or alive. And so, objectively, it's both (Schrodinger). But subjectively, one or the other. And each person who reads that Layton poem is left to play upon his own guitar of a colour of his own choosing... gloriously, agonisingly, and frustratingly free to chose the speaker's fate. It's a brutal poem really. Brutal because suddenly the reader is suddenly made a god of that poem's universe.

And we're left to hope that there'll be a way for us to make our way. That tomorrow will be easier than today. That, after all, there's something to wonder at... if only a wall. But at least a wall. At the very least a wall. When that ends and becomes a plain... well, what's left but wandering? And after 40 days and 40 nights... what? Purity? But a purity of what? We must question what we are being absolved of as pain passes to memory and memory to forgetfullness. Is it an absolution of reason? Of intent? Of justification?

Time heals. Yes. But is that enough? Is it enough? Is it ever enough?

I hope so. I miss her already. She hasn't left yet. I haven't moved on yet. But I miss her. And so I stand. Waving. But not moving. Still. Hoping for, perhaps, a breath of wind to fluff my flaccid plumes.

©Pablo Braque