DEPARTURES

DEPARTURES

The ducks are leaving. I heard them last night, honking outside my window in the darkness, answering a call of the blood. Today I saw them, emblematic shadows in formation, moving formally across an emptied sky into an unanswerable sun.

It is September. The leaves are falling. The air is bright and chill. In branch and stem the living sap sinks slowly into winter; responds to the call of its vegetable roots. When shall I answer the Call? South! South! No argument. No equivocation. To infuse myself fully: Into life. Into primal barbarity. Into the house of the sun.

__________________________ Three young Australians invade the early morning tube to Ealing Broadway, gauche, noisy, with their yet-to-be sophisticated blood. While the prim secretary sitting opposite, defined by her reading matter as a Latin tag defines a nursery flower, is by a postal district classified.

But in the dark eyes and coded features of the young South American who reads ‘El Coronel No Tiene Quien Le Escriba’, Lineaments of an ancestral Spain project through the burning-glass of time a broken image of the future.

Eastbound, an inter-city thunders by. I stand my ground. My trousers whip against my thighs. My coat billows out behind. At my shoulders transient wings unfurled will dry and stiffen in the sun preparatory to flight.

__________________________ Travelling west, picking up speed, leaving London’s postal codes behind us, the endless rows of terraces give way to parkland and cemetery. There is only one departure: Between the bone-white marble slabs a fresh, raw grave gapes in the wounded earth. Nobody stops at Hanwell. We journey on. The twin ribbons of railway line unwind, merge always far in the deceiving distance, seem stronger than the strands of a spider’s web, silvery with promise in the sun.