SonglinesThe rendezvous - did I miss it? I hear a lonesome whistle - after the gust of miscalculation steered back on track, leaves publish quaint borsalino eloquence as today becomes tomorrow - some paralysis, some gesture of reproach: 'fuck you!' the real point of which lies in the gap, the translation from dim intent to 'that's obvious!' to retrospective explanation - reverse subjunctive - 'he would have meant .' then the story of mankind, the babbled speech in the kitchen - one more whisper, one less problem to deal with out back, on the plain of arbitration that stretches into the haze, distant, endlessly rocking, tiny adjustments, until the parcel of hesitation is wrapped up, the way a board meeting winds down, go home, lights out, lock up, yet the reason is not explained by the minutes a troubled secretary attempts to transform into a final justification for the nature of evil growing out of an absence of positive good, that is, it's your fault - who else? for growing up into something damaged, not at all what the relatives expected. What did they insist on at the school assembly? How the little bracket fits to the left, how you must be silent at the back of the class. The song lines - hear them moaning behind the wind from the sea as it groans over the beach and up into the dry hills - the four-dimensional arrays of speech extend from the bandstand to the knot of quarrelling drunks in the dark and their chorus of grief blotted out. The dog didn't bark, to give him a nature, and thus explained everything, but only to the smart guy. Now the moon with slow sad steps ascends its tower while a pale nothing is spoken above the silent clearing: a few couples look up, remembering a misspent childhood, and an awful noise begins, a clattering that clambers up over the horizon - we've left the sobbing secretary behind - loaded with a kind of message, a porridge of popular music and bad news announcements and always the weather at three-minute intervals - and now I remember what the city looked like, back then - glorious - meet me at the station, honey, don't be late.