A bubbling deceives the spirit, a trill alienates the heart. Something summons the past, other songs on other nights, other songs of other people, the bone flute, of course.
This was not a bird, not a beak, not a feather but sail and spar, rigged to go at dawn, course along many shores.
“Beauty, you’re frail. Your bones are able to carry next to nothing and yet your song travels, spreading as if a pebble had dropped on water...”
P
I walked under olive trees along the coast, following grassy paths, the breeze with me until I met Gogu, carrying a piece of kelp and a shell. At first, he did not seem to recognize me. How thin, how sick he is! Shadows of the olives shadowed him. When he spoke, I hardly listened. Each of us is going the same way, I thought, and so we parted and stillness put its loneliness about me. The words he had said mixed me because I had not listened, mixed with my love-memories, adding incoherence.
Why was Gogu carrying kelp and a shell? Why was I walking where I had often walked?
In a hundred years, this path has changed little: the trees have become more gnarled, the shadows darker, the air quieter.
The marble shrine at the end of the path crumbles year by year and yet remains about the same: I can remember it when another brought me: Phaon remembered it: and now, memories are re-dedicated and burned, their ashes under my sandals, under my fingers and heart.
P
The best of life is illusion, I do not doubt. The best of Phaon may have been illusion.