/\ ><><>< /\

The valley’s wide and ragged blackness
felt huge and frightening
to fill with my voice; to touch the deeply textured
glades and hollows, animals, and the alleys of torrents
all at once; the abandoned cottages; in the lamplight

I remembered lovers, and friends,
and in the mountains … it is like an anteroom
to the cosmos of night, Greek temples
and Minoan harvest-palaces were aligned, after all
to the stars; forest paths, like winding tracks
leading above; but no, my death

won’t be such an upward ride. It will be like
at the London Nautical School
on the South Bank of the Thames, when I was asking a boy
about the stories he liked, and his answers
chimed, and rippled into me, before he spoke; time’s fabric,
in my mind, had ruptured,
and I regressed into the past
even as I saw ahead; a simultaneous cross-over:
I saw memories and their contents
as white, liquid, tadpole-like sacs
with an evocative membrane, fierce, and semi-permeable;
this left me stunned, and as I climbed back into the room,
as if through a window,
he looked concerned. Or perhaps I misread that;
perhaps, when I was in the slipstreams,
he hadn’t noticed, and my journey to the future
had happened in a trice, an eyelid