[Image: “Three Worlds (After Escher),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

Yes, it’s true: I posted no “whiskey river Fridays” installment last week. In fact, a week ago I was en route from our new home to visit family back in New Jersey; although I knew I’d dropped the Friday-blogging ball for the first time in a long while, I simply could not pull everything together… (This qualifies as a benefit of retired life: leaving jobs undone even when you know they need doing.)

So this week, I was pleased to discover resonances from the past two weeks over at the river. First, consider:

About the Phones

Closing my car door, you always say Watch
for deer and text when you get home.
I want to, I do, but I will forget.
Time moves and I forget. Look
I am trying, I am, but it’s not the kind
of thing that trying solves.

Once
on the side of a highway, a cop told me
about dragging a full grown buck out
the windshield of a wrecked car all by himself.
About the sounds it made, Like the devil learning
what regret feels like. About the woman it kicked
to death in the driver’s seat. The phone call
he had to make to her grown daughter after
whose first question was, Did the deer survive?

Different cop, different time, different highway.
Said she keeps her phone on silent then spoke
about securing the crime scene in that classroom
in Blacksburg where one student shot
all the others. Every single one of them
had a cell phone, she said, and for hours after
every single one rang and rang or vibrated
across the floor in the same slow way
that blood pools. No one was allowed to answer,
no one, so instead the phones rang all night
until batteries were empty, voicemails full
of a thousand Call me when you get this so I know
you’re okays. Turns out time moves the way
blood does. Batteries too. Runs out
like a startled deer across a road. Listen
I am trying to find a way to tell you this.
There are things that trying solves but this
is not one of them.

(Robert Wood Lynn [source])

…and then this, from just a few days ago:

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

(Derek Walcott [source])

And having considered those two glimpses of inner life made manifest, through the skin, consider the following depiction (not from whiskey river) of a setting which tells you all you need to know about a human element it includes:

London slept, but fitfully, its every other eye wide open. The ribbon of light atop the Telecom Tower unfurled again and again, traffic lights blinked through unvarying sequence, and electronic posters affixed to bus stops rotated and paused, rotated and paused, drawing an absent public’s attention to unbeatable mortgage deals. There were fewer cars, playing louder music, and the bass pulse that trailed in their wake pounded the road long after they’d gone. From the zoo leaked muffled shrieks and strangled growls. And on a pavement obscured by trees, leaning on a railing, a man smoked a cigarette, the light at its tip glowing brighter then dying, brighter then dying, as if he too were part of the city’s heartbeat, performing the same small actions over and over, all through the watches of the night.

(Nick Herron [source])

I love this sort of synchronous chiming between unrelated sources.