The ages fade daily from memory,
but an instant calls to mind,
times thought lost through dull decay.
-- Tours: Nov 1972
Palimpsest
An ink-smudge on papyrus—
ghost-hand of Charax in the margin,
"νοῦς ἀνθρώπου—" and the reed
bends.
Clamour of looms in Nineveh,
threads humming patterns
no eye remains to read.
Rust eats the bronze mirror
at the base of the Acropolis;
I see my face in it,
fractured—
half Helen, half the boy from Tyre
whose sandals wore a path to the salt market.
A gull cries.
Concrete breaks its own silence.
Words come in fragments:
"– et in Arcadia…"
"—ye towers of Ilium…"
They lie like bone shards
in the posthole of a vanished hut.
No elegy is whole.
Yet, in a metro tunnel,
fluorescent and wet with transit hum,
I glimpse her—
an eyelash curve,
a gesture from an older grammar.
Time uncoils.
Memory is not kind,
but sudden.
Oxon: May 2025
