It is very still, and often she looks through the window:
but he does not come back, but neither does he explain
why, that evening, he walked along the tracks
and didn't stop walking even though
there was the sound of the train's klaxon and the
heavy sliding squeal of the coming
locomotive braking.

It is a subtle and an elegant film.
One may call it a meditation on loss.
Several times one sees the fume of a kettle
in the foreground or the background:
I didn't hear boiling on the soundtrack,
but I saw the vapour,
and I thought of the spectral nature of process,
of real events which we don't notice,
except sometimes, when they form our heart.

While I was being streamlined on the train that day
I was reading the paper.
I had a copy of El Espinazo del Diablo (The Devil's Backbone)
which I wanted to lend to my friend,
Claudia. An oil tanker had broken in two
and sunk off Iberia, and I read about
flags of convenience and greed and oil;
later I saw a photo of a white seabird
only its head and upper neck not slicked in crude,
and I thought how beautiful was the metallic blue
of its round eye, staring out at me.

'Espinazo' I assume shares a root with our English 'spine'.
In the same Independent, I saw an article on the launch
of a new game, speaking of unprecedented depths of immersion.
The piece detailed pinnacles in the rise of games,
a desire to move beyond shoot-'em-ups and brain candy,
and these things floated in my mind in Guillermo del Toro's film
with the ghost who the children called "the one who sighs";
I noticed, too, how a certain game was described
as the killer app for the Nintendo Gameboy.

The paper, and time, and the train, and words, and skies
drifted on that day. There was information
on Glock pistols, a carnage of paparazzi, Heckler & Koch,
but I thought of Santi, the murdered little boy
in El Espinazo del Diablo, who walked everywhere
with a fumerole of blood floating upwards
from his broken cranium, his skin very white
because his body lay at the bottom of a watertank,
and his eyes remarkably similar in quality
to those of the seabird all glutted up with oil,
a strange
mishmash of tar and feathers,
as if we had taken revenge upon it
for collaborating with an enemy.

My work that day was to be
anatomical drawings for Nature Reviews Neuroscience,
and Renaissance sepia paper and ink studies
superimposed themselves upon my memory, and marine creatures,
crustacea with their shells, and vertebrae,
bone, and dream, and organ,
until the weird loaded rose of the brain
upon its thorny spine
holds up my head, and my mouth, my unkissed lips,
through which trains are moving
diesels and electrics, freight units, as if
out of a raw tunnel. You know, it is my belief
a poet does not merely reflect reality,
but constructs it.
And this is where beauty comes in,
and the freedom, not to change things, but
to set them free.

In my novel, Dustless, my child hero, Zysoshin,
dreams of a place which does not move
and in which he can store
the moments he loves. Well, Zysoshin's fate
is a terrible one, but I imagine one may understand
his desire to secure some domain
vacuum sealed and unmoving
to which he may venture always
and retrieve
the delicate conquests of his being,
the times he was beautiful,
when he in his life was good, and in this,
of course, he is like me.

Alas, it is a naive wish, impractical and if you
think of it a moment,
entirely unfeasible. It is not for human beings
to achieve stillness, because life is not still;
not even death is still, I'm afraid.
The closest I can imagine to realising Zy's dream
of a perfected memory, a house for beauty,
is inevitably dynamic, awry with drift,
like the candles put in little paper or wooden boats
and floated on the river, lit,
to commemorate
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I mean, I suppose, this —
we know nothing, or rather what we know constantly
eludes us. Once, I wrote about love, and a summer,
and how at that time
I thought like a river. Now I am dry,
my thoughts are dust. But I cannot
grieve over that because grief itself
is also dust, and as dust
is blown by the unowned wind
free and without destination.

Even to dream of stillness is to be dreaming —
mobile, and with the illegal
happenstance of dreams. The oil on the beach,
and Santi, the "one who sighs", they are our natural
nightmares, and belong to us.
When the rain falls, there is no one there
to collect it; and when the thaw comes
no one can really, truly, remember the snow.

It is my ambition
to set the world free. And this poem, Maborosi,
is both my attempt to engineer that liberty and
the mark of my failure. Only for this moment
can it be numbered among
the undestroyed. Memory
is an outpost, a buttress, a child
watching Thunderbirds or Stingray. Zysoshin's dream
cannot contain Zysoshin, the boy himself
is inside the dream inside him, there is no
end to that, one falls
ravaged and cruelly salient through all the fragments
of plum blossoms and chattering trains.

It is less fantastic, in a way, to believe
in ourselves than to believe in ghosts.
Thoughts haunt us, and one speaks
of a haunting beauty. Those irradiant ones who despite
our laws
persist — we might say, unnaturally —
who are they? Destructionless,
the river destroys,
and leaves no footprints,
but is dotted
and speckled
with moving blossoms.

And those irradiated ones who according
to our laws have died
what possesses them
to maintain their hold upon us —
we, the innocently and unspeakably greedy,
whose very kisses
are stolen on the breath of others?

In the film, Maborosi, she seems to walk upon
her own reflection in the water,
with a lavender sea sky above her
and a fire with fume of black smoke
similarly duplicated in the tidal pool
at evening, when the day
mirrors the night.

In such reflections, one may perceive
a kind of symmetry, but the film
is very deep. And of course,
it is only a story. We know the woman upon the screen
is not the widow of the suicide,
but the actress, Makikio Esumi, who
has taken on the role.
She will not be a widow when the director cuts.
And she was never, anyway, the widow
of Maborosi — was she?

Yet it is serene, precise and
without affectation.
There is another scene which is simply
a light bulb, placed there by an unseen hand,
rocking beside a clock upon a drawer
towards stillness.

But what of those — those innumerable ones —
who do not move
phantasmally, upon the screen?
What part will they take on,
who will they be
yesterday, tomorrow and today?
Will they be us? And will they
play out the nightfall, the scent of thyme, and the stars?

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 2003.

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