On Borders, for Becky
By Aki, with all my love 28/04/17
“I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know.
Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven't said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.”
We live in a border which is like the impression of a house –
a rushed sketch, half remembrance and half lepidopterist’s dream,
formaldehyde and pencilled notations like music, paper wings twitch-tracing
cathedrals and synagogues out of air, filling them with the shapes of things you left behind, these small inheritances over which you worried, then
brushed your fingers in the days before you left as if you were dancing, leaving the suggestion of skin to linger as scent does in the fold of a pillow, or sunlight in the corners of windows.
Each thing shifts, as we do, in our imagined house.
Each precious thing will
plump and ripen like plums or cherries
plundered, scrumped, or snatched from the grass of an orchard.
At the doorway, a silk kimono is draped
from a coat stand in the shape of a woman’s body;
in the front room a painting by Klimt looms then disappears into shadow;
in the moment before you turn down the corridor to the bedroom, you almost stumble over an ottoman propped up on four small yoga mats –
in the bathroom two deep white basins drip water to the rhythm of a blues song lazy with summer. A blue toothbrush with soft, flat bristles lies on its side. Along it is etched [Pietela is to Jansson as Vita is to Virginia as Helen is to
the world].
The rooms melt each time the eye tries to focus. Still, there is no doorway in this house not filled with the shape of you, no silence not bridged by the fading-out of laughter or a song, caught, as you turn your head, in a window-pane lit up with the flame of dusk which is orange and rose-gold. No one is here to see it: they are all asleep, your friends, each in her own house,
you caught like a wish in the tremor of their eyelids, a feathering-out of poems and prayers murmured somewhere under the early morning trains and a rain so light it mists the world.
We are in a valley, which is a thing caught between mountains,
but even a valley can lift from its hinges, tempted by the slow dazzle of truth to stretch up out of the tall grass, past the blooming lilacs,
emerging, finally, if not into light then into the way towards something like a lantern in a forest, something like a house inside which someone is whistling a song, inside which you are uncertain of anything but the great joy of life’s smallest kindnesses, and beautiful things so vast
they cannot be seen or loved fully except when one chooses to live strangely, to live boldly, as you did, to fill the house with sweetness as you did, and let it grow and decline and grow again with the light as you did. To let our house build itself.