In the sidelines standing

In the sidelines standing, I am the ragged-arsed man,
who watches the world go by.

Observation is a solitary art, imperfectly practised.

Concealed by my guilt, it seems without purpose, a futile waiting;
my lonely hands hang impossibly by my sides.

All my troubled looking brings me birthday numbers on a cheap card,
words about bridges in ruins, the love of a good woman.

And the world goes by.

I see a place to build a house and it is gone;
I see dark places, haunted by weathered farmers;
I hear rain on windswept roofs; I observe until persisting memory
dims, recedes like a hairline, greys, shrivels, gathers up like age.

A river’s course, a graveyard and its stones,
a thousand stands of trees pass like the muddy road winding.

Like a continuing line, the horizon in my life, always present,
always distant, invisible by night, follows, dogging my steps,
a discrete presence, friend or foe, observing me.

My loose hands hang in a gesture of ignorance.

I see a mountain, a swan, a field of lights, a wide, brown river
sluggishly going home. I hear the sound of machinery,
motion washing me downwards.

All land slopes toward the sea, but islands cannot chain me.

This same journey without salvation propels all unwitting travellers
to where destinations will no longer place them, where bricks, mortar,
masonry or beams will not house them for anything like ever.

And I observe that we travel like dust in the eye of God
where our own dust, our own eyes, blind us to fates and furies.

In the sidelines standing, I am slipping into your distance,
a figure on a cracked horizon, tilting in the spiralling universe.

In the telescope of your parting look I rotate away, flash a signal,
repeating and unintelligible.

Stuttering quasars in our starlight quadrille, we observe
in broken sequences, in the sidelines, mocked by motion.
a moment’s vision then no more.

I see you and you see me.
Who believes observes.
The rest is dust.

God blinks, wipes our dust away

© BH, 1991/1996/2022

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Another from the archives. I wrote this first in 1991 on a train, I think, somewhere between Insch and Huntly. I remember winter. I was travelling north.

Revised in 1996 and now in 2022, I suppose it’s about being a not-so-innocent bystander at a time when there seemed to be a mainstream life fit to join. On a train everything is passing. That profound note is in there too. Just how impermanent all of it really is.

The image is a sketch of mine from the 1970s.