— Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
I love the smell of hyacinths. It's a heavy smell: heavy with the buds and the burden of new life; heavy with the sweet and smothering shrouds of death. (I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different.)
A couple of years ago I took some photos of the hyacinth garden at Anglesey Abbey, intending to use them somewhere in my planned hypertext version of The Waste Land. I still haven't done anything with them; maybe I'll get round to it this year. (When does "this year" start, or end? If the wheel keeps turning, where is the top of the wheel?)
There's so much that I keep meaning to do, so much that I keep starting and not finishing. (These fragments I have shored against my ruins.)
I wonder if anybody will ever call me the hyacinth girl. (I do not think that they will sing to me.)
