Finger Exercises

Spots.

Facing a clear wall the anomalies are more apparent. When the view is busy, the dots sink into view. I am chasing them, they are chasing me. They are more inside my eyes than I am. They are more at one with me than me. Staring at a white wall, I can make them dance all over it. Black dots translated over one shade then another, always in sync, the same distance apart from one another, like a definitive scattergram of the precise points I will never see. I can sometimes see fine hair-like lines between the dots, only semi-opaque. I look up, I chase them, I follow them down. They appear the same colours as oil spills, with that rainbowesque finish - guiltily beautiful. They look like bacterias and other details. My eye is a microscope. They are shaped like The Plough now, now Pisces, and then lost. I look through them, I zoom out, I concentrate on the world, I get on with things. They look like spinning jennies late in the evenings, I am living behind a damp film.


Unstabilised.

The small head is turned, in retrospect the movement seems long and hardy. The child has grown, the parent shrunk. One second and the posture of the child becomes taller, more agile, an obelisk rising from meek jelly. One sharp impulse to check, and to both learn and bear the truth, and the child is no longer shielded beneath a heavy armpit. With the sun on its back and the terrifying wind behind its wheels, the child is on and on and up and out and neither puddle nor corner could muffle this sound. It is the sound of the speed of light, and the child grows quickly into this new body of motion. The child is leaving the skin of the earth, is off and away, as the stratosphere is but a rotation or two from here, and the parent waves, and the child does not notice the look of consternation on the old human's face, and the world is below - then above, then below - and the child flew through galaxies but now it is bleeding with its small hopeful head in the snow.



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