1920-22 Draft of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom – Page 96

It was so hazy, the dark of a forest, where I sat would be the same whether my eyes were open or closed. The shock of pain, when even our engaged friends pass, was on me; for no step had sounded and none would be sounded but the last one when I also would have passed. The shock of pain, when even our engaged friends pass, was on me. The memory of Niagara and memories would at times seem a tumult of sounds rushing into stillness, as faces sounding into one silence, a silence of no color, the waters falling forever to rise, to fall elsewhere. The steady approach of rain shedding all color from the summer-leaning pavements, until no decision, no decision remained but the one decision, the way forward, like morning with no choice but to arrive or be arrived upon. For even our sharpened shadows turned toward what maddened us like bears before carcasses, death, of spirited madness, was not feared. The ocean's fine breath was always carried in the carried wind, as the rains also carry our hearts also. Frond after frond, the water carried inland without an atlas. The water is a door even to open air. Though at the fountain we leave, we do so knowing what we entered as a storm was not haste, and what exited, what was taken off as a skin, was not flesh. A shell at each season, a skin for sun, and one made waterproofed to be taken again. I have no regrets (how many have, and how old would I be? I am a few years Tea. The tide to the storm, the unknown of my days, and none but friends await the returning of the sort; for a parent and a child share something before our losses - the last echo of an apple core and being abandoned to air for a sweet reason to exist, a pact we stir - a name carved in stone). Comes a silence shattered only by the folding of the shirt, the name if a house cannot remember the name. There is the tattered wind closing a door, and the memory of the door closing itself. The wind had an avenue, time has an avenue on the avenues of men. This wind is a voice coming to leave again from outer lands, as Medea, not Greek nor foreigner, as the tangfold rain is always something of a visitor, something of a seer. As the draining fountain had let the water and the seepage fall from its edge and fall again as if a cloud passed, we walked along its ground, its sill, to be carried further in in an hour to fresh travels far where even you and I must go now, and I must turn to leave you at the threshold of the stream. Matter is the dark matter of the heart, an island.