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When my eyes are closed and in the confusion of
all that light inside my skull,
I am waiting on a remembrance, like an item on a list
of exemplary “To Dos”, of that person
or group that I am meant still to meet; they are a sacred family
touting for a lift from a passing bus, they squint at my
puzzlement in an ineffable silence, moving in their
perfectly coloured clothes as if about to begin
the important journey, not a final curtain call,
but the beginning of a major passage through mountains
they will never own or know, a family of marmosets
with a mission beyond the forest’s warm cover. They
are always ready, gathering their belongings,
shifting back their out-of-place locks from their white eyes
that are cast in different directions, looking as if one, like
the Burghers of Calais, grouped together yet quietly in
despair moving up through the flattening mist.
Who are these lovers of mine, my closest destinies, lilacs
of the soul, waiting upon my disappearing self?
I know I am required to meet them, pass my hand to
them like a visa to a border guard, wait with them
as they make their chartings of the mountains,
remembering in advance the past that becomes now and
the future that is a heady longing, remembering the wind
that has breathed by over me into the watery reeds, warming
the early steps around the mountain plains.
My mind is the summit of this mountain, the central one
in the perfectly immobile range that cannot smile
nor speak nor show anger, remaining always either
the beneficent friend or the indifferent enemy.
I do not know where I am, but beneath my feet
is silver grass, remnants of a moon spangled banner
and fields and fields of question marks begging
for attention. Am I in heaven here? Or,
in a mirror of mirrors, holding
a final picture of green and blue, mild as honey water?
The group of shuffling persons is near again,
angling across the skyline, a jagged shadowed group
of desperate intimacy, looking through blind eyes as the day goes.
The border guards are gone, my visa is damp and blurred,
a memory of the future, coveting a history of eclipses
in an undertone, in the silence of a few pages,
a visa, stamped for one visit. Do I search for the family
or are they searching for me? Why are they blind
on the mountain summit yet walk with a deliberation,
a likelihood of getting somewhere, through the storm garden,
purposeful against my un-purpose, my inevitability?
I wish them to be the future held up
in a cup of warm hands, the garland of barbaric smiles.

by Guy Barker,
February 2008