And it was like those days -
like water rising, or a building falling down.
The games we played which weren't games
because they made us cry;
or which made us cry when we realised
exactly that they were games, and they weren't true, or real, after all...
How far into the furnace do you want to go?
My voice, I mean: how far in
do you want to go?...

How wide is a flame?
And then we dipped into each other, palms into cool water,
and your hair splashed across my face...
It is like stars in wavering, where we walked,
I shimmer in it. How far in
do you want to go, the apparition
in the mirror asks? How far?
This far? Drowning far?...

You know I believe
some people are founded upon the abyss.
And their way of being alive is the constant
struggle to bridge or in some other way
negotiate the abyss.
They look in the mirror and they see endlessness.
They look in the mirror, they see a night sky
over Siberia. And the same with a thought.
And the same with a glance.
With a dream, or with a love...

Their hearts are abyssal.
They have seen the breeze die and the leaves
settle in the evening:
they have seen the crowd disperse,
and the streets
die into quietness, die back
into endlessness...

It isn't romantic, or anything, just a matter of coping,
with a quality I guess like pharmaceuticals,
a way of being practical
with a wilderness...They are founded upon the abyss,
and their hearts are an abyss.
So, wherever they go, the abyss goes with them.
And when the sound of the traffic fades,
or the train comes to a halt in open country,
or when they lay their heads down on the pillow at night
they know what is, and what is not,
deep inside them.

Do you know the film Ring, where the ghost Sadako
crawls out of the television?
It's a wonderful moment - I guess what they call
a coup de théâtre...
It is literally like a kind of blow,
a blow on the heart, the magic of the shock...
On the screen, in the video,
she climbs up out of the well
as she has so many times before
and crawls in black and white towards the viewer...

Does life have such moments?
Those moments which are blows directly on the heart?
So your world shakes with realisation?
Tingles, and rings, vibrates?
And changes?

It was like those days.
I was lost in you for months...
The way you can get lost in a song,
and I would write lines like:
there was sand I brushed it from your lips,
the cathedral and seashell of your intimacy... Well!...
Deep inside you, where the bell sounds sometimes...
and there are fairytales -
before life meant something, and did not.

I imagine you've forgotten what our life was like then,
and what it meant...
I did not even realise I had forgotten...
Although... When I saw your image
in the shop window...
Except 20 years had passed and you were as I last saw you.
Then I knew I had forgotten -
I remembered, you see, that I had forgotten...

In the liquid mirror of that moment,
the crowd around me...
It was as if my own heart nipped me
quite physically, with the pincers of a small, amber-shelled crab...
On the beach, there, with the wooden bridges among the dunes...
I suppose it was a moment of vision.
The way the present melts away,
crumbles, perhaps just like the famous madelaine in lemon tea...
The whole city of the present
dematerialises, and the city of the past rises up,
and you're gone...

I believe life is more visionary than we generally think it.
I mean, it's founded on visions,
not facts, although the facts accrete themselves
like barnacles on a hull...
The ribs of an old sailing boat,
in the sand, you can still see
the gunwale was once painted red... and now...
is a shade of bleached peach...

Sometimes my own life seems far away from me.
I feel exiled, not unpleasantly, from the weight
of my own being.
I guess it's groundless. Melancholic...
The things I cared for seem notional for a while.
It's a landscape drifting through a train window -
far off, out there, in the past...
I can feel it:
pulsing, life endlessly ceasing - pulsing, and rippling,
murmuring, like children's voices out of dreams.

Sometimes I think our world is now regressing.
As if it has reached a point of maximum extension,
and now the angels begin to return,
and people begin to go back towards the sea,
ceasing endlessly, pulsing, murmuring...
It's strange to think I'll never touch you again,
or kiss you again.
And yet in those days I was drenched in you,
I breathed you, and you were deep in me -
so deep that when I reached for my own eyes
I found you in them... So deep, you seemed my nature...
As deep as the past, in the past...
Although your voice is quiet, I can still hear you speak:
blue eternal depths, the moon in space...

I think of myself as so barren, now - and yet,
I don't know how I arrived here -
I, who was conceived in Singapore, 
and - I don't know -
there just seemed a kind of plenitude, you know,
something like rain in me,
sweeping and open and endless, refreshing itself the way
a wave refreshes itself in salt and motion...
Really, one should stay away from mirrors:
they're dangerous - don't you think?

Do you think that, too? That we are going back to the sea?
Our spines melting inside us, so we go down
like crustacea? Do you think that's possible?
That Nature has no use for us in this form?
That we are too cruel, too polluting, too violent?
That we must be broken down, and file back into the waves
from which, they say, we were originally born?

I was watching A Chinese Ghost Story the other night.
I love the way the ghost moves -
the beautiful one, not the tree demon -
in wirework,
a kind of fluttering skittering zoom
like a form of heavy moth
or some levitating, lacy jellyfish
blown along in an aerial current...

She once asked me:
how does one deal with the distance inside oneself?
I was very struck by that question:
you know, for a few moments
I didn't know where to put myself.
There was something gently shocking about her voice
as she asked me - some terrible melancholy -
how does one deal with the distance inside oneself?

You learn a kind of composure, I suppose,
or at least try to.
And it is different - pulsing, rippling... Sparkling...
Sometimes distance is brilliant with hurt;
or it can be stoner, chilled out, a kind of uncaring,
novocaine, you know, just the miles and the miles...
Or peaceful - after its work is done, perhaps,
and one simply accepts it
the way a night lake
accepts the light of stars.

You were in Spain once and you told me
how the wind began to blow in off the sea
and you wondered whether the wind came from Morocco,
from Africa, all the way,
and if you could trace the wind back
to where it was born
as if it were a transparent thread,
and it stirred your hair and moved against your bare arms
scented with the sea and with distance
its home of a desert,
arising there, at night perhaps,
shifting a little...

God, sometimes I miss you... I miss you...
Simon was here last night.
We drank wine and beer,
listened to music, talked about things,
the banana plant in the corner,
the golden Buddha, seated, dust in his palm,
the polished wooden floor
which reflects the white, phosphorescent light
of the oblong wire-and-paper floor lantern...

Like a child's philosophical conundrum:
what is nothing? How can nothing be?
you can pore over distance like a spacy book,
enter it, invoke it in a whisper, feel it
brush your face like long downfalling hair...
and never resolve it, never really close it,
but always brood over its pages of skies and silences,
and then he decided to wear the silver,
its palm fronds, broken-down truck
rusted to a ferric lace,
its tinkle of goat bells in the pass, humid launderettes
on a summer's morning, sweat and washing powder -
it's something you manage, I guess, in life,
learn to live with,
put away from yourself, somehow,
imagining your world as best you can,
putting those you love close to you,
putting them first,
and keeping the prowling, luminous animal of distance
at bay, folding you and yours
into an embrace, the deep
dream of proximity...

But still, my work is full of distance...
The solid-seeming world, you know...
How it rests on a voice...
The meaning of the word, love... Or true;
or precious, or priority...
A blush of breath on a mirror,
a faint, flaring, obscuring warmth...
Distance is always making its way
across my poems, opening them up, showing them
the humility of years, the discipline
of great silences, where no one is, or has ever been,
distance is always moving in my poems,
swelling them like sails,
filling them with emptiness...

Yes...
I wondered, isn't rhyme a kind of return?
The return of one word to another?...
Then it's wax and butterflies...
Extension, mutation, the acrid dynamo of the heart...
The heart of the glance...
The heart of stars...
Heart of a word: wax, atoms and butterflies...
Yes...
Where was I?
Ah, yes...

In another poem, you know, a suite of knives:
Suite of Suitcases...
The hero of A Chinese Ghost Story is very charming -
not too bright, but kind-hearted.
He's aided in his adventure by the Bearded Swordsman -
a strange vulgar man, a very spiritual one
who finds it hard to live among people.
The film isn't particularly scary, I don't think - if anything,
it reminds me in places of English pantomime:
it's very theatrical...

I like the way in which the hero -
who doesn't realise he is dealing with a ghost -
ends up by pursuing her, being in love with her,
not letting her go.
It's a gentle reversal of convention:
in a way, he ends up haunting her -
the flesh and blood mortal haunts the ghost,
won't keep away, must always come back for her...
I found that touching -
it moved me.

Swans and the river; lovers and their love;
and overall the sky of pale, Buddhist blue -
the beautiful sky of emptiness and incarnations,
living beings like necklaces of shells,
threaded on a memory...

Swans and ghosts, too... Entangled, and memory:
and again, as always, the miles and the miles -
the miles and the miles...
I wonder, which is more frightening -
the terrifying, deliberate phantom
who recurs and recurs, vengefully, compelled
to return over and over again
savouring some faint whiff of living breath,
conscious of his own disembodied state,
his gaseous condition -
this, or the ghost who does not
know he is a ghost? And wanders,
stumbling, into the same place, yet
finding it different?...

Isn't the essence of haunting an inability
to leave? A failure in the transition -
an end of transit itself, an eddy in moving...
So that one must always come back -
just as in the cliché,
like moths arc and wheel around a lantern -
to the point which is somehow unreal and yet
is endlessly being realised?
Isn't it to want? Isn't it a form
of desire?

You come back, after all these years, and yet
it is not you.