And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain

If one lives long enough — which may mean years or merely the duration of a single sleepless night measured not by clocks but by the repeated recognition that what one believed had ended has only withdrawn beyond the next bend of consciousness to await its own inevitable return — there comes at last the realization that every room into which one enters has already been occupied by one’s former selves, by the youth who mistook desire for destiny and the older man who would afterward mistake remembrance for wisdom and the child who had not yet learned that houses listen more faithfully than the people inhabiting them, so that the very floorboards, worn smooth like the oak and marble stairs of defunct Army & Navy department stores beneath generations of footsteps no longer capable of remembering the bodies that impressed them into the grain, seem to exhale beneath the weight of the present not resistance but recognition, as though saying, without accusation and therefore with the greater authority, that this grief too has crossed here before, this longing too has paused beside the same rain-streaked window while beyond the warped glass the trees, older than every promise ever exchanged beneath them, continued their immense and patient conversation with the wind that had already forgotten the names of those who first called it by that name, and while the country music station plays soft there sits beside him the woman whose nearness is of that terrible and merciful kind which reveals by its very warmth the immeasurable cold surrounding it, whose hand resting upon the table appears less to touch the wood than to steady the invisible burden of all the gestures she has not made and all the words she has understood too completely to pronounce, while he, believing for another instant that the body may yet persuade the soul to remain where it has already begun departing, watches her face gather and relinquish the uncertain light from the opposite building until it seems that illumination itself has grown weary of deciding whether it belongs to flesh or memory, and from somewhere within the walls there arises the coughing complaint of old pipes carrying through their rusted veins not water alone but echoes of winters endured by tenants whose furniture has become kindling and whose names survive nowhere except perhaps in the stubborn inclination of a door to remain half-open after every attempt to close it, while farther away, or perhaps nearer because memory has abolished every useful distinction between distance and duration, there drifts the faint persistence of a radio whose forgotten melody neither consoles nor wounds but merely continues, as rivers continue beneath bridges after the builders have become dust and the dust itself has entered the roots of sycamores leaning over the current with the melancholy patience of judges who long ago abandoned the hope of rendering verdicts, and outside where the vacant lot lies under the slow accumulation of moonlight like an abandoned field beneath the ash of innumerable harvest fires there move the indistinct figures of those who have accepted wakefulness not as an interruption of sleep but as their native country, laughing with that extravagant confidence peculiar to people who have not yet suspected that every laughter immediately begins rehearsing the silence destined to succeed it, while somewhere a lantern swings in the hand of an old watchman whose duty has imperceptibly altered across the decades until he no longer patrols against thieves or fire but against the dissolution of meaning itself, pausing every few steps as though to listen not for footsteps but for the immense breathing of the earth beneath him where generations lie folded one into another like letters never opened because each recipient died before the post arrived, and then there is the boy, or there will be, or perhaps there has always been because no man entirely escapes the child who first discovered that loneliness possessed a grandeur exceeding happiness in the same proportion that abandoned churches exceed occupied parlours, cherishing his injuries with the solemn vanity of one polishing inherited silver while remaining ignorant of the hands that blackened it before his birth, believing every farewell unique because youth cannot yet comprehend repetition, cannot imagine that the oldest story told by the heart is not the finding of love but its endless transfiguration into remembrance, until years afterward he will look upon his younger sorrow not with contempt but with gratitude for the all-night girls and their escapades out by the D train, recognizing that even illusion performed faithfully becomes a species of truth, and museums, churches, courthouse squares, collapsing cotton gins whitening beneath relentless summers, abandoned rail sidings where iron dissolves grain by grain into red dust, the slow black water beneath cypress knees where turtles vanish without ripple, the family cemetery enclosed by leaning stones whose inscriptions the moss now completes in a language more patient than the ghost of electricity howling in the bones of her face, these visions of Johanna that kept me up past the dawn, all these places which once appeared separate begin at last to merge into the single vast architecture of recollection wherein paintings inherit the fatigue of roads and roads the silence of graves and graves the expectancy of cradles, until history itself no longer resembles a procession advancing from beginning toward conclusion but a wheel turning through the same griefs beneath successive names, each generation accepting from the previous not answers but unfinished sentences whose subordinate clauses continue multiplying long after the principal verb has been forgotten, and then the invisible beloved — not absent because she has departed, not present because she has arrived, but existing in that sovereign interval where possibility acquires greater substance than possession — moves once more, or perhaps has never ceased moving, through every chamber of thought with the noiseless inevitability by which groundwater shapes caverns hidden beneath mountains that imagine themselves immovable, and conscience, exhausted at last by its lifelong labour of arranging memory into chronology and desire into morality, relinquishes the impossible accounting and allows everything — the rain upon the roof, the murmuring pipes, the weathered porch, the jewels and binoculars hanging from the head of the mule standing motionless in a pasture where no plough has passed for decades, the train whose whistle belongs equally to departure and return, the woman beside him, the woman beyond him, the child, the old man, the dead listening beneath cedar roots and the unborn already dreaming their inheritance — to enter the same inexhaustible sentence in which nothing is finally lost because nothing is finally possessed and where love itself, having abandoned every hope of fulfilment, discovers in its own incompletion the only permanence ever granted to the human heart.

Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?