Clouded
Clouded“Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”
Philip Larkin, ‘High Windows’
Pendle Hill dappled yellow in weak afternoon sun, bald and stubbled gold. Red-bellied clouds drag heavily across the sky, a wounded pregnancy attempting escape. A single plane shoots out, its mundanely named flight path reminding me how Meanwhile taught me to smoke; a perfectly vertical exhalation, long, slow and bored. It leaves its own smoke behind, and a silver-stitched weal in the sky.
Like ‘Envoy’, with the University Church’s “whitepaste fingerless sky”, I reach for the word “across [the sky]” rather than “through”. Like Larkin’s endless blue, I want to be folded into it forever, yet the subconscious insists on translating it to the two-dimensional, the flat. An attempt to limit possibility, to neutralise the distance? Undesirable stasis?
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves
The way I feel today - 10 July 2004
Just seventeen - 17 March 2004
Roads to freedom - 25 February 2004
Confessions of a failed self-harmer - 25 February 2004
Manchester, united - 25 February 2004