The Black-necked Stilt (or, The Remembering To Forget Song)

A wandering and frequent intermission of attention

In which ideas slip irretrievably away

Would perhaps have something merciful in it

Were a few choice wriggling grubs 

The lingering fugitive scraps of some possibly useful knowledge of the fleeting universe

Remaining alive squirming curiously about waiting

To be plucked from the mud flats of the dilapidated mind

By a Black-necked Stilt

So determines the confused old person

Recognizing in the same moment

It was never going to have a say in any of this

The evanescence of pleasing images and the persistent adhesion of painful ones

The worst of both worlds

The world of forgetting and the world of remembering

A wandering and frequent intermission of attention

In which ideas slip irretrievably away

OK it may not not sound all that great as a default state of mind

But surely there must be something merciful in it

Muses the old person to no one in particular

Recognizing in the same moment it was never going to have a say in any of this

Somewhere in the haunted house a light bulb flickers on then off again

Fitfully whispering in the mind a complicated arpeggio

Which may or may not resemble the complicated arpeggio

Which decorates the opening bars

Of the Remembering To Forget song

Himantopus mexicanus

Himantopus mexicanus

Himantopus mexicanus

The old person dimly remembers a long childhood illness

Months alone in a dark room

During which the meanings of words slipped away common words

Becoming more and more strange and unrecognizable until all meaning had evaporated

At this late date the old person has determined it is the business of life to go forward

Even if the drift of the mind moves toward the past inexorably

One who catches evil in retrospect must first turn back to find it   

That regrets are no more than afflictive encumbrances this much it knows

This is not useful knowledge 

This kind of arid harvest would be of no interest to Himantopus mexicanus

The struggle to recapture the past is a vain struggle

The small birds in the old dying and bare plum tree singing their own small versions

Of the Remembering To Forget song

As from a great distance

Penetrating the twisted leafless winter branches with the first weak rays of early morning sun

The small birds and the tall thin birds each in their own way conducting the daily business

Of moving life forward

That movie about memory loss

Whose title the old person can no longer remember the labour of recollection not worth it

The small birds in the old plum tree singing So long So long

The Remember To Forget song