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tomorrow starts today

Resolutions – how easily we shelve their need, until the next time.  Irresolute at first to destroy the cumulated trappings of a rubbish existence, one Spring morning I’d set about exorcising ghosts; and with increasing speed, misered mental artefacts of time found themselves consigned to a more accommodating dustbin – along with their material back-up: a bric-a-brac of letters and photographs, stained beer-mats, odourless cocktail sticks, cups, coins, champagne corks, chopsticks, bills for hotels, bills for jewellery, bills for perfumes, cuttings, theatre tickets, programmes, tickets, bus tickets … bus tickets?  Even with the lid on they seemed to have collected dust, and there were no real regrets when they disappeared from the screen for good.  

                   almost a whole life 
                   in a cardboard box – outside,
                   blackbirds dig for worms

That was then; but there had been some items in that cluttered file of myth and nostalgia that could not be written off so easily – not, at least, before attempting resuscitation through a reunion of old faces.  And even now, they resist eviction – ghosts of one sort or another – Smaller and clearer as the years go by.  Perhaps too much a part of self, they seem determined to cling on till the house falls down – every so often emerging out of the curtains or the woodwork to disturb the empty room like great moths of the night.  Worst had been the found dead; and their legacies – the guilts of Orpheus and Schrödinger put together. 
                    finding her at last –
                    dead, some ten years previous,
                    I thought that the worst. 
                    But then I learned the details –
                    Why is my anger so old?

memo: Remember me … but also
            Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

             Fat chance!

Notes: Poetry quotes are from Larkin (Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album, & The Trees) and C. Rossetti (Remember).  In an attempt to convey something of the quantum strangeness of things, E. Schrödinger posited a thought experiment: a cat is put at random mortal risk inside a closed box – the cat is only alive or dead when you look inside the box.  The popular Orpheus and Eurydice legend (used here) is only a late/secondary myth – Orpheus is more likely to have been the victim of summer solstice sacrifice in Dionysian rites (killed and torn to pieces).  Ugh! 
                                                                                    1993rev.