One entrance to the past is through memory—either oral or written. And water. In this case salt water. Sea water. And, as the ocean appears to be the same yet is constantly in motion, affected by tidal movements, so too this memory appears stationary yet is shifting always. Repetition drives the event and the memory simultaneously, becoming a haunting, becoming spectral in its nature.

Haunted by “generations of skulls and spirits,” I wants the bones.

Now time curves back. We almost touch.

∆ Michael Ryan, from Consider a Move, A Difficult Grace: On Poets, Poetry, and Writing (University of Georgia Press, 2000)

“We lead lives of relentless separation – comings and goings, airport embraces, loneliness, locked doors, notes left by the phone. And the deepest of all those divides is the one that separates us from the places we inhabit.” Kathleen Dean Moore, The Ecology of Love

Yet it can happen, suddenly, unexpectedly, and most frequently in the half-light-of-glimpses, that we catch sight of another visible order which intersects with ours and has nothing to do with it.

∆ John Berger, from Opening a Gate