It is your montage, your photomontage
soaked in sodium vapours. It is your minute corner of your vast unexplored
universe. I am seduced by that silent passion. So I stare into it, then step
timidly across your threshold and I begin to live it. I consent; I allow it to
invade a minute corner of my very own unexplored experience.
I cross the rain lane, splash my shadow, who obediently proposes the direction in which to saunter. I blink repeatedly to clear the raindrops from my eyes and I am strolling, uncertain, uncertain in my footsteps, toward it yet again. I float closer and closer and the image feeds into my consciousness in such an insidious manner that I become the image and we are a sentient being and we look back out to where I came from, and you, Peter, are bobbing in and out of focus a bit like an origami sailing boat on a sea of cardboard waves. It happens to be a scene from the Theatre of Memory. You look comic. Rain is lashing down, Peter, but you do not look stupid, you clown, you jester you! I feel strangely guilty so I look down at the shoes on my feet and it dawns on me that it is forever going to be infinitely complicated simply to help myself, let alone help anyone else. You do your best and I do too, the result is neither here nor there.
The fire tree is always between here and there. Its spindly, twisted moss covered branches and twigs are herein and forever bathed in sodium yellows and, as night lives on and on and on, it is always between here and there and there and there. My intuition declares that the tree is on fire. It crackles in my soft head. It burns in the oven of my skull. We are between here and there, Peter, what you have given life to gestates in me, here and there, but it is neither here nor there for, all too soon, it will be just ash.
In the distant valley the vultures are
picking the carrion clean. Bones are bleaching in the midday sun. I say that
the tree is on fire. There is, of course, no divine advice. There is only rain.
There is only damp moss. Damp moss on twisted branches soaked in sodium
streetlight provided by anonymous councillors for model citizens like me who
are prone, just occasionally, to take just one step further towards a world
lived from a different perspective. For once, Peter, I can see you, but, not
only that, I can see what you see. We are a sentient being. The tree is on
fire. It smoulders. I need no divine advice. I love that quiet passion. I love
you. I need not ask what that means.
