river

A river of sadness runs in spate through the landscape of my mind altering familiar landmarks and creating the unfamiliar. As I wend through this land, known yet new, I wonder again what time it is. Patches of light illuminate distant spurs of ideas to my minds eye, snatches of songs vaguely heard and half remembered, not quite forgotten. I am here yet, where I was is here, once again. I remember sitting in a barber’s chair, I am a child getting my hair cut, it is an old building from colonial times, it is rounded, an entire side is open to a verandah that flows to the outside through a row of columns, a clean well paved open space with a large shade giving tree, a benevolent giant stands there, a few cars are parked there and it is quiet, uncrowded, that afternoon. The image, perhaps drawn and not a photgraph, of another haircut, depicts the side of the head of a model, dating from 1944 – that is what I remember, it appears to have originated at the time of the second world war – serves to guide the man who trims my hair, I am not happy to be thus shorn. It is not a warm day but neither is it cold; in an instant this last thought brings me back to where I breathe ... in the present. The future is glimpsed like the tantalizing shimmer of something wished for, half imagined, half ‘real,’ not quite understood. I am here now.