The winter has gone by. Bittersweet bottle-running dazed nights at home, the comfort of a familiar quilt, the love of parents forgiving transgressions with mutability writ large on their minds. Tiny week long interlude with her at the end, gone by like an already fading blur. Next, the journey back to a grey land where the trees are bare of leaves, and the afternoon sun shines cold and mellow-sharp. A certain melancholia hanging over it all, a silence no amount of music passing by the earphones can conquer and contain. Telephones convey distance more than proximity, the anxiety that the centre might not hold. Through it all, the reassurance of knowledge, glowing, inviting, warm; come, traveller, give your frozen hands an hour's respite, an hour's solace. Lose yourself in the fire's ecstasy, breathe in its energeia, grow like a phoenix within its chaos.

'And 
one by one 
the nights 
between our separated cities
are joined 
to the night that unites us.'


The last lines broken from 'Ode and Burgeonings', 3.  
The Captain's Verses.
PN, 1952.