the history of goodbye

At 6 am, it feels late.
All of life is rushing past
wind and wet pavement.

Past the note he never wrote (to me).
Past the everything I now leave out.

How many tears constitute too much?

Outside my window, there is a pigeon.
I watch it struggle to balance on the thinnest branch.
At the top of a tree that sways,
I see grey on grey.
And I could never tell if we were always beginning
or incesantly-on-the-verge of saying goodbye.
Much like last winter.
One year ago.
With my relentless perch upon an impossible precipice.
And a poor understanding of physics.
That the thinnest branch will never hold
that much weight or substance.
Knowing this.
But driven to try.
Thinking, 'this time it will work'.
That there is always t h i s time.

There is a physics to relationships.
Their torques and levers in tender balance.
Each one different from the last.
Their particular confluence of internal/external forces
that never come to bear exactly like the last.
And no way to prepare.
The (e)motion of freely falling bodies
and the mechanics of the human heart.
With no safety gear attached.
Always best re viewed in the rear view mirror.

How Newton's Laws apply:
Inertia. Acceleration. Reaction.

Inertia.
What I've felt since last August.
Resistance to change is ever-present.
How every body continues in its state of rest,
or of uniform motion in a straight line,
except in so far as it may be compelled by
impressed forces to change that state.
In terms of inertia, therefore,
rest and uniform straight-line motion
are manifestations of the same thing.
Innate in all bodies.
Too lazy to start without a push
and once in motion,
requires further force to slow it down,
to stop or change direction.
But for air pressure
and the downward pull of gravity.
Gravitas.
The things that weigh us down
are often met
by that which lifts us up.
Recognizing this.

Acceleration.
The unfolding of chance impressions.
That there will never be another quite like those.
With his unique breed of magnificence.
That the rate of change of momentum is proportional to the impressed force, and the actual change takes place
in the direction in which the force acts.
How such a force changes (the direction of) motion.
Momentum being the measure of how much motion one exerts
(based on mass times speed)
towards another.
So long as one considers a definate time to things,
any change in speed is directly proportional
to the amount of force used
and inversely proportional to the object's mass.
That the heavier the heart, the slower one proceeds.
And the lighter the heart, the more force one needs to keep up.
However, a force need not act through an object's centre of gravity to produce a given linear acceleration,
for the force will create the same linear acceleration
whether or not so directed.
That if a force does not pass through one's centre of gravity,
if it does not move directly through the heart of things,
that one can change speed in a direction
that is parallel to the direction of the force.
The oblique angle of an end-of-August gift.
A completely random act.
Of serendipity.
The saving grace of new directions
and the consequential 'thank you'
that is not enough.

Reaction.
To every action there is an equal and opposite reacion;
or the mutual actions of two bodies in contact
are always equal and opposite in direction.
Simultaneous action and re-action.
Forces working in opposing pairs.
As when a bird beats downward
with its wings in search of flight.
Its body and the air it strikes
separately create equal-but-opposite forces.
Just as the earth moves up to meet the bird,
the bird falls down to earth.
Love is like this too.

But after much undue strain,
with all the flutterings and hoppings
of its upsanddowns,
the pigeon by my window finally favours flight.
And so one wonders.
What makes anyone persist as long as this?
Even if another might have given up so much sooner?
And why is it so easy for some
to ask directly for what they want,
while it never occurs to others to seek support?

Something in the appeal of thin ice.
The anticipation of an impending crack.
Not knowing when
in the growing space of everything breaking underfoot.
The subsequential slow-cold slide
beneath the surface into black.
The adrenalin rush of going under.
And then the sealed-click
of something hard and slick above one's head.
Unsure of what comes next,
except for the fluid flow
of becoming-uncertainty.

To perch
upon the most precarious branch
just for the view of it.

6 pm is timeless.
Life is out of joint.
And no Deleuze tonight.
Just strange transitions.
Hail followed by a rainbow
stretching large-and-close across the lake.
I watch it fall until it fades.
Stunning bands of colour burn,
then disappear.
Just like the shiver-of-that-moment when
something good is lost.
That kind of disbelief.
Like John Book walking out towards the open road
away from what he loves.
And Robert Conway's manic quest
to regain a lost horizon atallcost.
The unknown-unknowns that lie ahead
and their impending force.
The blindfold-and-the-black-ball-in-a-black-room paradox
as yet unanswered.
While also knowing
that the next one thousand characters are all used up.

For now.

And

o

to have him tell me
one more time
that we could share
a drink,
a little jazz,
another tale.

But instead,
the force-of-black
bears down upon this listening night.
Ground rising up to greet me
til I beat it back with my blank stare.
This is what returns into my empty sky.

Just goodbye.

And yet,
it matters more than most.