| The Poetry of Richard Sansom Published by The British Sansom Society | |
 
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| My Space-Time Continuum When we're old enough to know what skeletons are we can run our fingers along the outlines of our jaw bones and eye sockets and measure out the shape of our skull, that some-day-death's-head remnant of our living face, touch a knee, shin bone, ankle or thigh, imagine them exposed by the shrinking tinsel skin of age. or bare to the white, lying in the earth. But we don't do this while young; aging and death is the stuff of aging and death, not the stuff of youth, nor do they seem to occupy us as they might had we some morbid curiosity as to our changing shape, that mysterious journey we've yet to take. And yet death is always there before us, even if kept in the hinter thoughts, pushed back to where we dare not touch them, for they can turn any moment into a struggle we do not wish to make. I stroke my face and feel its curves of skull-shape, imagine it, like Yorick's skull, uncovered some long time hence by unknown hands and eyes, and feel them searching for the possibilities of who and what I was, knowing well they cannot open up that truth, but simply stand and ponder, philosophically: "Who was this man? What did he do? What were his words? Was he good?" What folly to engage these graveyard thoughts over a white, stone-like visage, empty but for earth, revealing nothing but the merest fact I lived, was here, breathed and spoke, and moved about; grew old, my mind and spirit finally gone, leaving only a white cephalic stone. But I do not exist in the calcified margins of my face but as a living being, left for a traveler in time and space to see. If I am . . . I always will be. | |
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