Inner chalice

is it like a libation?
does it grow red like wine?
and sometimes golden?
is it an urn in silver?

I was standing by the car – the deep blue car – the ‘chav’ car – the magician’s vehicle. I was smoking and looking at the view, at how the land fell away to a great plain that a train ran across, to how the distant, the most distant, land melded blue, dark blue, with sky blue.

Alone – can one pour into it?
What do you pour from?
Can you pour from it?
Lift from it and soak it in?

Two men and an adolescent boy walked up the hill through the sheep field – the sheep wise in their silence and meditation. The boy had an angled and muddled gait, that told me, even from that distance, ‘special’ – in that special ambiguity. I didn’t want them to interfere with my nicotine communal; I looked away to the sky. But then, a minute later, the boy was talking towards me – a ‘keeper’ on either side, nervous of my reaction. He was in my face, too close, his teeth ajar like his upper lip, spittle down the side of his mouth. In jangled and jarbled words, he was talking about a car wash and how it didn’t work – no water came out. I didn’t understand much of this, but his nervous smiling keeper explained. The boy kept saying “Why? Why?”
“I don’t know”, I said, “maybe it was cold and the water froze in the pipes.”
They went away and then, a minute later, were back. The nervous smiling keeper wanted to take him away from me, but something in me jarred, and I said stiffly, sharply “No, it’s okay”. Staring at the spittle near my face, I felt warm and in a rounded voice “Sometimes, things just go wrong. It was broken in some way perhaps.” I smiled at his keeper who smiled back. “That’s just life”, I said. Both keepers thanked me, and, after asking about directions, all three went on their way. I drew another inhale on my cigar. I watched the boy walking – he seemed smoother, calmer. 'Just my imagination perhaps’, I thought exhaling.

It is like a libation;
it grows red like wine;
and sometimes golden,
it is an urn of silver.

Alone – I cannot pour into it
nor from it. I can only look
at it, enjoy its amber glow.
Only in meeting, can I pour
from it and into it,
can I savour, and enjoy.