The story varies a little each time I tell it. I guess it’s just an elaborate way of saying I took up drawing.
It’s a sunny day
But the sky is grey
There’s nothing really in the weather
I’m still missing you
But that’s nothing new
In fact I think it might be about to change
I keep on catching glimpses
The way the sunlight falls on things
I keep on catching something new
When I think of how you see
New eyes, new eyes
Made for the sunrise
Now I’m filling books
With my scribbled looks
At all the things I took for granted
That’s a cup of tea
That’s my old TV
That’s a pair of shoes in the corner
Why can’t I keep on looking
Till the sun no longer shines I keep on catching something new
When I think of how you see
New eyes, new eyes
Made for the sunrise
She left a canvas at my place – she left a lot of things. Some sort of
unfinished landscape. Beautiful and pitiless in her new clothes, she left
me. One afternoon, nursing the burns and weals on my chest where she’d
torn herself away I picked up the canvas, ran my fingers across it, the
surface rough and firm. I could feel something underneath, so I used a
tiny silver knife to cut it open. Pain struck me. I reached in with thumb
and finger. Very strange – a pair of eyes, blue-grey like hers, glistening
and clearly still alive. I pressed them into my sockets, dry and empty
from nights of tears. It felt strange at first, but slowly over days came
a new world of form and ground, of light and shade, of shape and line;
colour active, like a conversation unheard by the old eyes
The way a book lay on a desk, the way a tree leaned in the wind,
like something true that had been true forever.
Why can’t I keep on looking
Till the sun no longer shines I keep on catching something new
When I think of how you see
New eyes, new eyes
Made for the sunrise
© Norman Lamont 1997