In between the river and the reflections,
day or night, you can see sparkles —
ocean slowly pulsing into tidal estuary,
transfusion for diseased city, and
in between the trailers and the movie
sparkles invade your mind —
split seconds of nothingness —
splinters of dead air and dead cold
whispers of a million words on bookshelves,
a billion chords on compact discs,
a billion beating locust wings,
desert roads in the mind, green blurs
on hilly horizon: trees, fields,
steaming volcanic lakes, whales and herons,
landscapes internal forever —
and lost at the moment you die?
at the moment you die,
lost forever?
You find portals beacuse you need to:
the museum behind the fake technicolour castle
with the prayer wheels and jade knives,
scraps of ancient bibles and screeds,
where they play chants through hidden speakers
between the glowing display cases,
and between floors you count a few empty shops
stuck in the haze of winter and old cloud —
between shops and between hours
you find a space you recognize
where someone sits who died before history,
head bowed before a newer moon,
still pool beneath willow bridge, sandals
placed carefully beside shawl, pen, ink —
knowing something that you once knew.
Between pulses that tell us we're alive,
between instants of stimulus and response,
between droplets of this endless rain —
words, notes, snow, kisses —
flashes of something familiar from long ago.
Between work days and sofa evenings,
in between years of shifting identities —
frozen windscreen wipers sweeping
centuries off eyesight of lifetimes —
strobe flashes and advertising lasers,
glitters caught on river water and
apartment block window fronts,
cranes dancing in winter wind
like weather poles and wind chimes
beside glass-still pool of mind —
in a pure instant between instants
you are bowed down before a memory
that you do not know is a memory.
As if in a dream, there are those
who try to remind us —
in between meals and games and
in between all the sparkles —
rituals built into the chaos:
of sitting before a wooden tray for tea
of kneeling before icons and cruciforms
of sitting with someone strange —
someone of still pools and dead blossoms
someone of dead screens and dying rivers
someone in between the moments
of attention to this or that lifetime —
intersecting universes, colliding realities —
someone we find in the place where we are —
someone who is a memory
that you do not know is a memory.
Like cats' eyes peeping out from the dark —
in between our madness, our fits
of distraction, racing uphill,
looking out over frozen ochre city,
wide harbour, lumpen island and white boats
and sunlight thin and red and distant —
in between making love among the trees,
underneath fallen roots, luminous
emerald moss, tiny sprinkled mushrooms —
in between desperate hours of stillness
heart pounding as nothing happens,
guts wrenching as nothing is transformed
into other forms of nothing —
and all the forms of the mind,
demonic, angelic, ridiculous and tender,
pour into this moment as a billion sparkles
and leave you as empty as half an hourglass,
timed out and clear, in between epochs,
waiting for someone's hand.
In between someone strange's reflections
caught on windows, mirrors, pupils —
an old, tired theme of searching,
so sad and desperate and surrendered —
you still hope that in between these ghosts
and false gods, false selves and wraiths,
you might glimpse the doorway —
to the frozen land through the back of the wardrobe
to the unreal city below the lake's bottom
to the magical land on the other side of the mirror
to someone familiar waiting patiently outside time,
as if enclosed in a pale moon heaven
that you do not know is a memory.