Forensic Exhibit 1: Found Note
Unprepossessing. – I begin with an unprepossessing sentence, it’s just a word in length. A long word though. – in the middle of a dark lane, in the middle of autumn, when the middle of an afternoon can feel like night – Oh! It’s a very short word, “night”, but casts very long shadows – Ah! The middle of the lane, that’s where I had got to – and that’s where the car was – then and now – when I was held up – well, these lanes are narrow, you know, and there was a car parked right in its middle – What’s the middle of narrow, I wonder – Ah! The car in the middle of a narrow lane – there are so many of them, aren’t there? – narrow lanes – cars parked in them like the waiting of others holding up your passing, which is a waiting too, if you know what I mean. – Anyway, as my cabbie blew his horn, like his nose, shouted at the top of his voice, without rolling down the windows – nearly deafened me – then rolled them down and shouted again. – As he shouted a second time, I noticed that the lights were on in all the flats beside – evening comes home early in autumn to unwelcoming surprise. – Darn! It had gone dark again. If only light knew darning. – From one of the brightly lit windows, music! – Mahler perhaps. Yes, definitely him. – In the middle of a narrow lane, in autumn’s middle, Mahler had held up traffic – Only a fellow desperate to widen his narrow, breathless lane out into an expanse of dark water, to breathe in, must have remembered Mahler so urgently and forgotten to put his car in the garage at the end of the lane, and walk back. – Oh, he must have been so desperate. – What is the tie that binds light to music? – In a bright room darkness sings from the CD player and you don’t see its silhouette. – Silhouette. – A silhouette emerged from the building and backed the car away. Whew, Mahler was off the hook!
On the way back I asked the driver to slow down as we approached the lane. Yes, that one again. In a little, unprepossessing neighbourhood, a detour that cabbies take to avoid running into the thoroughfare. Cabbies, like lovers, love lanes. – “More intimate like, for ye foreigners?”, my cabbie asked – “You want me to pull over here, you sure?” – I had confused the man. – “No just slow down as we pass”, I said. – The lane was in darkness. No lights from the windows. But, there was music! – Sibelius, most certainly! – What is the tie that binds music to light? – Does music in the dark give you eyes? – I looked up at the dark windows, not knowing which of them was musical – I looked up at them like the mother of Lemminkäinen, who has seen the approach of the Swan of Tuonela over a dark lake; – darkness, through darkness, lets you see – momentarily.
Strange creatures aren’t we though? – We eat and drink so that we don’t know what we are eating and drinking; we cry, because we’ve misplaced laughter in the linen wardrobe of years; and we laugh, because we’ve got no tears left. – “Strange creatures aren’t we?” I asked my cabbie. “We sure are”, he nodded. – Strange indeed, I tell you: we try to find sight with our hearing, listen to Sibelius and Mahler through open car windows, but don’t have it in us to face them in our rooms. – Sorry to have taken so much of your time over such an unprepossessing detail.
Jetone
A sky-rocket, albeit a falling one; a river dolphin in the sun, invariably a falling one – are utterly devoid of meaning – reflection of a shadow, echo of a memory that has lost its sound – a meaning that dances in the mirror, before a still truth. – How meaningless, like Jetones in a laboratory – ludic excess of a chemist’s self-deprecation – “Oh, you know, Jetones and Ketones are my only joy!” – They are my only joy – Jetones that put a frown on my thinking and a knock on my door that is also lapsed in thought. – But, I don’t open my door, ever, though Jetones are my only joy.
Jetsam – Jetones on the promontory – a ship has thrown away Arion’s song – jettisoned Jetones: snagged by ribs of sand a broken lyre looks blankly at it’s memory of dolphins. – Propped up against my closed door a broken cithara fears that its dolphin dreams, neither water nor truly air, shall be deemed meaningless – a Jetone – and shall fall heavily, like sound on deaf ears – a knock on the door unanswered – mine. Fear of meaninglessness I presume, that Sphinx of thresholds. – Jetones gather on both sides of closed doors.
(Author’s note: In christening this form as Parapoems, I use “Para” in the sense it is used in French, to mean ‘against’, ‘to guard against’, to almost resist, being poems. A kind of poetry, in prose, and without the heraldry of poetry.)
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