The Ungrave Digger

 

The Ungrave Digger

I had arrived and felt no more part of the world as when I had left but arrived smoothly passing through veils of air distant and different from the land underneath. 

                                                                                                                I stepped out of the solid car and held my hand on the door moving it slowly shut while looking on at the house where I did not want to go while also having no desire to stay outside and so moved in comprosmise, slowly.

                                                                              The wind blew and moved the hairs of my head as I eased gently towards the door at the end of the long path that I would open with my cold hands that would also brush my light stems when inside and looking at a mirror.

                                                                                                                         Though I am expecting someone to welcome me I am offered no greetings and a darkness of the corridor engulfs me so I continue on and leading my tense eyes to look up from the steps of a curved staircase on to an artificial light hung to a wall view instead at an old painting of a new church full of the only light that softens the hard house and I am drawn to it because moths have gathed round its rusting frame and because it is immoveable but I have not come for the settled paintstrokes of a house for worship I am here for a person I have only seen in pictures on the walks of my own home and my father’s home where now I stand in his own father’s house folding back time imaging their memories in the absence of childhood and adulthood for they are both gone.

                                                                                   Both are dead.

                                                                                                             I sit at the writing desk and leaf through the papers of manuscript and the books of research written by both hands of each parent thinking of the passing clouds that were gracefully crossing the air outside of the window overlooking the garden with its two plots of beds holding peaceful sleepers being crawled over by black shapes from the sky.

                The flowers grow from the dug earth while I am beside with them being brushed by the wind as they are in the shade of my solid figure dutifulling standing, staring.

                                                 Over my shoulder the flicker of the bedroom window glows carefully brighter as the ground outside grows colder, becomes forgotten.

                                                                                                                                     I give a little gust to the bedside candle as I fall back in preparation of my own little plot of peace plotting in my unseen thoughts as I tuck myself into the ruminated seeds that grow into a quietly uncurling meditation of how the bodies of the casted history must have in a silent series of days leading from this one turned, breathed. 

                                                                                                    The moon light creates light silhouettes with dark borders through the atmospheric curtains while I imagine the ancient eyes of ancestry looking on at the same shades and colours that fall upon the floor below the painting of the church and the graveyard.

                                                                                                        The morning light covers the canvas with seperate shadows that have only become noticeable in the paint, hardened.

                                                                                                                   The shadows of soldiers, children, gravediggers, marching, playing, digging on the grass of the ground and the walls of the church. 

                                                                            The sense of weight reaches me from the created form of blocked out living shapes stretching and tugging behind me as I walk down stairs away from the picture where stifled air conjugates pouring water over my hands trying to leave the cold of the stoic shadows in the sink of the bathroom absently letting its glimmering silk overflow between the toes of my bare feet between the cracks of the cool tiles allowing the lightness of sun fill each of my tough silk sparkling eyes completely, whitewashing.

                                                             In the white there is my unknown grandfather made up of still images and moving words written in the study with a sturdy fountain of ink while watching wet feet cross the blades of grass under dark masses of water through worn frames and blue paint pupils thinking of thoughts far away and concealed, underground.

                                                    Standing above the plants I stare airily at each newly opened miniature square chasms of the ground with the flowers in the soil piled up in heaps of mounds beside while the clouds uncover the sun watching two clear shadows walking on the surface of the soil away with one familiar outline holding another firmly affectionately waving, fading. 

                                                 I wipe the moist skin above my strong smiling lips.