Expressive Explorations

As I round the corner a man and his tiny daughter are standing beneath a tree, eyes on the ground. "They're called helicopter seeds," still uncertain on her feet, she reaches down and grabs one and throws it into the air. She giggles and he smiles as the small seed twirls to the ground, to rest and then I'm past them.     There was a sycamore tree      in my neighbour's garden      and the helicopter seeds  would fall       onto the path  of the house I grew up in.      I'd grab handfuls       and float them      into the village stream      and watch them wash away. As the delight fades behind me, I am alone again and grab a copter of my own. I carry it down to the river railing of the big new city and look out across the churning water, until watchers move on. I let the seed fall and follow it for the time its beautiful shape allows, before it cut...

I just saw the cord of my blind swinging and was surprised by the strange shapes of its shadow; the differing of an object and its shadow felt like original thinking, until I remembered the cave of an old chap called Plato. Other languages probably have a word for when you felt so mindful but were beaten to the idea by more than 2000 years, when out of the obscured, spins a thought, so graceful, until new light means the shadow disappears.

My partner                    at the time found you in a hedge on the way back from work dirty tired and alone and brought you home So small                    at the time that we thought you were a kitten rather than malnourished and mistreated as we later learnt from the softly spoken vet who you didn't like at all It took a long time to loosen your fear of people as long as it took for the beautiful grey and black splotches of your fur to return to beautiful white and black and to soften to our careful gentle touches that were permitted more and more by our new family member I didn't mention                     at the time that I suggested the name Bess for your superficial  resemblance to a cow but you responded to it and the name stuck before my motive was uncovered A miracle         ...

My friend was talking about a painting by Magritte, of a pipe that is not a pipe. Straight into my head, with calm fidelity, I saw an image of a pipe, floating in space - the sort of pipe water flows through, with a right-angled bend in its shiny metal. I looked up the painting, to be sure, and I'd got the wrong sort of pipe all together. It was not a pipe, but a pipe . Hmm... Maybe I was thinking of the cover of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells? Out comes the phone again. Closer! The background is as I imagined and the material is similar, but still no pipe. Unsurprisingly, this floating monolith is a triangular tubular bell. So where did I see the pipe? If I did see the pipe. Which is of course not a pipe (of any sort) anyway...