 |
The Hiss Quarterly Vol. 5 ~ Issue 4 I Am The Walrus koo koo ka-choo |
|
 Terry Border |
LAUGHTER, MIGRATING SWALLOWS Here is Albert, commuter from a suburb of the mother city, pleasantly yielding to privacy on a Thursday in, to escape from commitment on a Monday out, to memory, reverie, sleep. This is a familiar, occasional moment when, his train submerging into the tunnel from the surface tracks on a morning in, from city central on an evening out, he receives fragile, unaccountable images --- informed by hearsay, incidental reading, a documentary on the history channel --- of disclosures, years ago, during excavations for the subway. --- Shards of their lives, the dead of the centuries, the millennia. Forebears. Squatting around a cooking fire. Graffiti on a rock. Bones of a quadruped. A meadow beneath Unger Park, with grazing wildebeests. Migrating swallows. Nightfall. Forest sounds. Laughter from a leanto. A solitary figure hiding in the hills. --- And this is a familiar, occasional moment when, his train emerging into the brilliant present on an October in, an April out, he feels a warmth in his vitals and thinks again of the mysterious word humanity. © Oliver Rice
|
