Lines

Of course I think nothing is simple. Or perhaps that complex things are simple and that simple things are not at all simple. No good is just good, and no bad is just bad. The world is dappled, and drawn with pencil-hatching, and lit like a sphere which gleams from some angles and is dark from others, has sharp edges when you touch it and blurry ones when you are up too close. No real lines; an endless series of matters of degree, fuzzy logic, things melting into other things, everything continuous.

But not lately.

Grief like hot wires. Everything made up of instants, a pair of shoes, a wild thing seen, a cup broken, a fleeting smile. Yesterday I heard something wonderful, and it was like a brilliant, shearing knife-edge of light a micron across, pouring between blast doors black and featureless and for a magical, vertiginous split-second, invisible.

Last night, a hair on my pillow that was half grey and brittle, and half one of the usual odd mosaic of tree-like colours. A moment, right in the middle, like a fretmark in a wingfeather. A lost instant ... what happened? This morning, a collared dove took off holding a lime twig carefully at its centre of gravity, a spindly charcoal-coloured line against a warming sky, to a collection somewhere of twig pencil-hatching.

In the dark I find lines -- the edges of things, something to hold onto, the crack of light that tells you where the door is.