Pensive with Mark Strand

It's a reflective night, a pensive one, and as nano's left in its tiny coffin of tags, margin, and punctual bounds. I'm mulling over poetry, and the nutmeg and cinnamon sticks of my mentality perfume the dreamy air. I am Mark Strand in these stanzas, tonight:

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
(Mark Strand - Keeping Things Whole - Reasons for Moving)


We are all scattered pieces of a shattered whole. None of us, as yet, perfect, I'm fairly sure. Wherever I am, I am what is missing. I feel this, sometimes. Stronger in the retrospective melancholy of hindsight, where I am here and there and now and not. Nano is finished, but my story is undone. And in the void, spilled treasures of fae gold are left ashen. How I remembered these memories differently. A puzzle, once vibrant, stained in salty water that no longer matches its master - how will I ever arrange these cardboard cutouts again? If your life is remodeled, you cannot walk through the same doors, slide over the laminate in your socks, or ride the banister into the grand hall.



And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.
Mark Strand - Lines for Winter