It is always there, round the turning. It is always there, round the turning of the trees. Round the turning of the trees, it is always there just vanishing.
There is blood in our eyes and rape in the scent of history. Women are bruised at night across the cities and are abducted in the dry North. Flowers are starved of pollen. There are oil spills in the guts of Dolphins and the fragrance of melted icecaps above the masts of polar ships.
But it is just beyond the turning. Beyond the turning of the page. Maybe the turning of the age. We who are here can’t see it.
Then there comes one riding a horse with a golden saddle. His eyes are blue from a long Atlantean journey. In his saddle-pack a host of stories like genies from lost temples and forgotten pyramids. He comes while our world is on its last page.
The sycamore trees and the lavender bushes and the bluebells sprinkled in the tall grass don’t notice it. Don’t notice the last page of our age. Nor does the mottled blue of the sky. Nor the yellow radiance of the sun in the body of the clouds. They don’t notice it.
Just us who are here, breathing the electromagnetic glare, volcanic ash in our eyes. Our Vesuvius is not a rumble of earth and an embalming of cities. Our Vesuvius is in newsprint, in rumours and truth worse than rumours. In the dead eyes staring without wonder at the leaves.
But it is always there round the turning. Round the turning whence he comes, leaning forward on his horse like a weary traveller from out of an old leather-bound tale. His robe yellow and brown, dust in his hair. Though we don’t know it, for the air behind him is clearer than the air before him – he brings something we had dimly heard of in tales we learnt as children, when the waters were still innocent.
He brings with him – Oh, how can one say it without a flutter in the voice and a touch of the miraculous in the lift of one’s heart – he brings with him just a hint of the vanishing world.
Yet all we see is a pale church lit by a purple sun.