my biggest fear is you seeing me
the way i see myself—
the cracks beneath the surface,
the doubts i file away

i hide my flaws in shadows deep,
but what if you should find
the fractured mirror that i see
when i look inside my mind?

on the cover
of the new york time magazine

there is a man
standing

in the middle
of a crowded new york city bus

he is wearing
a perfect grey pinstripe suit

and a gorilla mask
one hand

holds the new york times
the other

holds a hand strap
my grandmother

upon seeing the photograph
for the first time

knows those hands
to be the hands

of her son

"NOT ALL PEOPLE EXIST IN THE SAME NOW. . ."
( for brother Brian )

your smile
like music for a movie
that will never be made

you travel through
your life, now:
unable to arrive at the present

you no longer
live in the now
that I inhabit

this my great grief
life, but:
life without you

Death has taken you
slammed the door
in my face

me left here
you in an other
place

you have left the planet
somehow escaped Time's prison
a new day dawns without you in it

remembering how you
relished Block's words that
"NOT ALL PEOPLE EXIST

IN THE SAME NOW. . ."

applying the statement to
whatever happening
happened to be happening

your smile
like music for a movie
that can never be made



His world was a world of electricity and circuits and whatnot....mine was of books and study. Work being scarce in Ireland he came to London to be with me....work was just as scarce in London and so he went back...not realising he was about to step into the job that was to last over 20 years.

He could soak up my world of Eliot and Hamlet and Block but his world was beyond my ken.  He would pick up little nuggets of knowledge such as the Block quote and then laugh and apply it to all and every situation.

Little did I think that I would be applying it to his death as a means to understand how my brother can be dead and alive to me at the same time. He and I both living in different NOWS.

Grief is a process and I am lost in a maze of pain desperately trying to find a way out.


"Not all people exist in the same Now."

Ernest  Bloch  in  his 1935  Heritage of our Times(Erbschaft dieser Zeit ).

"Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at the same time with others. Rather, they carry earlier things with them, things which are intricately involved. One has one's times according to where one stands corporeally. . . times older than the present continue to effect older strata; here it is easy to return or dream one's way back to older times. . .in general, different years resound in the one that has just been recorded and prevails. Moreover, they do not emerge in a hidden way as previously but rather, they contradict the Now in a very peculiar way, awry, from the rear.  . .many earlier forces, from quite a different Below, are beginning to slip between."

*

"But soon we will die, and all memories of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love. The only survival, the only meaning."

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Thornton Wilder in 1927.

There is another timeline,
where we are home,
—after a lovely Sunday birthday dinner
of friends

We are thinking of hosting one next.
We agree everyone will love the dessert.
We complain about tomorrow—
Usual Monday’s sorrow
We do our nightly routine.
I ask you if you want some water,
for your bedside.

—Not in this cruel one, no.
Yet in some other, —kinder— it is.