Douglas Oliver

The skin takes colours after middle age, an elbow flakes, one ankle always raw, a shoulder wart, sebaceous stains on backs. We think we’ll pulse an innocent energy outwards, a warmth from the heart, a skin cleanser, but think of some sin of years before and whisper, ‘May I not be spiritually deformed!’

Memory in sea-green with sea-weed grain of glass as the rearing wave rains briefly before a lot of bother on the beach of childhood and men with a burden file across sand. Those far-out surfaces are lipped with transparent phrases coming to mind: that the real dying happened in middle heights between the lips and the sea floor. Remember the swim trunks lost in waters and the first man in our...

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The Jain monk would live in unending harmlessness, shedding karma, confessing, studying for the fasting death. He avoids quarrels and politics, may not repair three unmended garments, nuns four, has rayaharana, the hand broom of wool or grass, to clear living things from his path, a cloth to wipe animate dust from his face and to prevent such beings entering mouth or nose. He takes care not...

Jetliners climb above the middle air of spiritual journeys: flying in dreams is usually humanised and takes the shaman route of older beliefs. Once, in a train derailment, I bore my sense of self so lightly it yearned for those middle heights. Probably, when dying, we rise above and see nurses acting in perfect democracy.

We’ll not romanticise shamans; but whatever our job or class...

Waking early, and riffling the pages of a book edge-on to watch the ghost pass through, thinking of the sexual opening of pine needles, the woman being absent from that opening; this is not desire but idleness as you might wake with legs around you from a dissipating dream, whose story came from a fiction you’d been reading.

And then to turn to the woman beside you discovering pine...