At Least It Was

I thought I saw you on the train

I hid behind some men
I had never seen you look so good
I'm glad you're doing well

I went out for a walk today
To think of things unsaid
Of course I found I'd said too much
So I laid all that to rest

And when the day falls
I guess it was love
And when the day falls
At least it was

You thought of the name to call me
I guess that's how it goes
I know a few with the same name
Yes, I'm sad I'm one of those

Ungraceful as I am in loving
And leaving I'm the same
It's way too late to say I'm sorry
But I'll say it anyway

And when the day forwards
I guess it was love
And when the day forwards
At least it was

At Least It Was. Emiliana Torrini

Rocks. Goats. Dry shrubs.

Buffaloes. Thorns. A fallen tamarind tree. Tents. Red bricks in heaps. White graves, flashes in a brown-yellow universe. A motorbike on an earthen path. An auto rickshaw, yellow and black. Palm trees. Bicycles. Orange saris. A white flower in her hair. Eyes.

Mahbubabad. The morning ride across Telangana, the high plateau east of Hyderabad, seems synchronized with my need for a slow reentry. "Time" again presents itself as a question: does it exist, all of it, all past-future, as a dusty, viscous elastic casing for the mind, twisted into the mind? Each of us gets to see a small segment buried in one of the twists. For example, I have been offered the second half of the so-called twentieth century - an arbitrary boundary, after all - and on for some ways into the twenty-first. One could also run the segment backward. There is even knowledge, however uncertain, of the part that supposedly lies ahead. In fact, one can see it from the train window. Yellow and brown, flashes of white, a grave.

Spring, Heat, Rains: A South Indian Diary. David Dean Shulman.

How does a project mature?

It is obviously a most mysterious,
imperceptible process.
It carries on independently of ourselves,
in the subconscious,
crystallizing on the walls of the soul.
It is the form of the soul
that makes it unique,
indeed only the soul decides
the hidden 'gestation period' of that image
which cannot be perceived
by the conscious gaze.

Andrej Tarkovsky

My mother did not tell me they were coming.

Afterwards she said she did not want me to appear nervous. I was surprised, for I thought she knew me well. Strangers would think I was calm. I did not cry as a baby. Only my mother would note the tightness along my jaw, the widening of my already wide eyes.

I was chopping vegetables in the kitchen when I heard voices outside our front door -- a woman's, bright as polished brass, and a man's, low and dark like the wood of the table I was working on. They were the kind of voices we heard rarely in our house. I could hear rich carpets in their voices, books and pearls and fur.

Tracy Chevalier.The Girl with a Peal Earring.

Our union is like this:

You feel cold, so I reach for a blanket to cover our shivering feet.
A hunger comes into your body, so I run to my garden and start digging potatoes.
You asked for a few words of comfort and guidance, and I quickly kneel by your side offering you a whole book as a gift.
You ache with loneliness one night so much you weep, and I say here is a rope, tie it around me, I will be your companion for life.

Our Union by Hafiz. The most beloved poet of Persia.

gestures

"During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life."

Nicole Krauss, The History of Love.

time

"that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves"

Walter Pater.1873.