The King’s Man and His Horse

I have no neighbours upstairs for now, and so can play the music as loudly as I wish.  It has been so very long since I have been here and poems and old stories and dreams haunt me back to these old halls and the doors I once used to open without knocking.  I once used not to care about not knocking, because I was so curious as to what I would happen upon, and I still don’t care about knocking but because for way, way too long, I stopped caring what I’d find on the other side of those doors.  I lost my curiosity, I suppose.  A loss of immediacy of knowledge both acquired and purveyed.  I once raced through roads of ancient forests because there was a place I had to be to send a message to someone whom I needed to connect with what I had to say.  There were cards and parcels that needed to be franked that day that I thought of them and needed to have the date-stamp acknowledgement of my intent.

 

I am no less in love now than I was so many years ago in those ancient forests.  I just don’t have the address now.

 

I once wrote from beaches that brought me alive, because I knew you heard the waves against the shingles as I did, and you heard the lap of the tides and saw the seal in the harbour turn his head to the western sun as I turned mine to the eastern sun every morning, watching you as you still slept, waiting for so many years for you to wake up.  Our own Brigadoon.  The book you kept and haven’t read yet.

 

I can take you back to that beach, if I can recreate it as ours, but I can’t take you back to the house in the mountains I wanted so much to share with you, because the mountains are still there, but the house is gone, and how many more houses and mountains are we going to lose before you understand that houses are only as sound as the mountains you lay under them?  And only as strong as you want them to be? 

 

My god, the mountains you and I crossed! 

 

It serves no use to weep streams nor to let rivers run the course they are meant to run.  I know how to turn the course of rivers, I have done it before.

 

So many years ago there was a spice rack before me in a village supermarket and I remember learning the Flemish word for cinnamon when I said to you over the phone that I would never give up on you. 

 

Zimt.

 

 

 

 

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