... on a dissecting table ...

When I smoke I always think about giving up; when I drink, of stopping. If writing, I cannot help but imagine not writing. I go out to buy an umbrella and come back, wet through, with a copy of the Koran; keeping the book dry under my shirt. In a local shop window there is an advertisement from a local poet, looking for a small flatette for himself and his few pet birds. Outside the medical centre on the corner is a pair of shoes; they've been there for days - first saw them when I was going for the paper one grey dawn. Small, round-toed, black leather slip-ons; a woman's shoes. One has a sponge inlay, they other, some kind of red felt inside. They are placed neatly side by side near the door of the medical centre, facing away, just beyond the locked box where the pathologist's samples are left to be collected. Where did she go, so early in the morning, so late in the evening? Who could she have been? It is impossible not to think of transubstantiation but whether she rose in grace or fell in despair is not certain. Or did she just shuck them off, wearily, with relief, and go barefoot up the narrow canyon of Lackey Street to the station? Catch a cab to the City? What are the chances of spontaneous combustion? The other day, outside Ashfield police station, I saw a woman holding an empty baby capsule of the kind used to carry very small children in cars; she was sobbing uncontrollably. Did someone kidnap her kid? The burly cop was rubbing his hand up and down her upper arm as she bent forward in hopeless grief. While two other women, one another cop, the other perhaps a friend, stood mute at the remaining corners of their huddled square. It is clear enough that every action, every thought, carries the ghost of its contrary within it. Presence suggests absence; danger, safety; grief, joy; indulgence, abstinence; a chance meeting is revealed to have been pre-ordained. While silence is both the condition, and corollary, of writing, as well as its ultimate fate. And yet sometimes there is a suspension of contraries in a singularity; sometimes people do disappear without trace, leaving only their shoes behind. Poets do find tiny improbable rooms where they can sing along with their few small birds. Books may turn out to be, after all, umbrellas. Or sewing machines.