it is the best of times, it is the worst of times (1)

... when it arrives, the moment to pack these most precious of belongings into cardboard boxes and send them to a faraway place -- and I'm forced to sort through them and make some stark choices. Which ones to take with you, which ones to leave behind? And how can you possibly create such a hierarchy among your closest friends? And how can you know beforehand which ones you're not going to miss at some point later?

Some of their landscapes, memories, scents are so full of life that all too often I cannot but yield to the irresistible urge to open a parenthesis and be led on countless, unexpected journeys, oblivious to the passing of time and the surrounding chaos.

At other times I just enjoy opening one of them at random and marvelling at the significance of these chance encounters, other countless journeys -- like the following, still sitting warmly on my lap:

With lips I have prevailed
and a brain of fire
now there are ashes in my head.
I haven't heard from you in months
because I am afraid of that black sea,
not needing the bathers in its foam.
More than a tincture of infidelity
more than a tight cock gathered in salt-sweat.
Standing in the rain is like reading
an inaccurate biography of you.
An echo of a sea, raging.

--Barry MacSweeney, from 'Brother Wolf' in Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000 (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe), pp. 30-31.


The task never ends, suspending the closure a little longer.