Isolated (Philip Hunter)

Waking

The Island Continent. You can see it from the moon. Moon of our going down and rising up. Tears and laughter as an isolated shower falters from a cloud. It is the cloud. You observe the entire skyscape with your brain, and its smallest changes. The Island Continent. Profoundly well-known before the Enlightenment arrived. The Enlightened killed off the knowledge. This was not the knowledge that it wanted to know. Strangely it remains in rich veins amidst original Islanders. They’re not saying half of what they know. In isolated settlements they share the sky and land. Their history stares silently at the millionaire banqueters who hang it on their harbour walls. The Island Continent. The Enlightened brought their print. Books were full of No Man is an Island. Comprised: The Island is Full of Noises. An isolated business, reading, despite the purpose of books to communicate and be inclusive. There are books on this subject, too. Books about overseas for when we don’t go overseas. Books that are their own land mass. A lifetime of reading and they are no closer. The books have not left port. They stay like some final answer, a rough scrawl in the cave of the brain. We are less than Enlightened. The Island Continent. Seas everywhere go down and rise up. Their waters filter over the land airborne. Inland, after weeks of dry, the cool reaches our faces. Rainbows are fortune. Who, in extremis, would not see a rainbow as a fair sign? The rain drops begin to fall on our face, our hands, our clothes. 

Dreaming

The brain is kept supple every day by taps, hoses, sprinklers, watering-cans, little bowls, and other isolated showers. Water them geraniums. A fifth of the energy of the body goes into brain maintenance. But how come we might have guessed the brain is not alone? There are two hemispheres, two brains, and might that mean two of each of us? Probably more, yet here we are all the time having conversations with ourselves. Several selves and a true self. Meanwhile, conversations continue between north and south, land and sea, light and dark, as each one of us takes turns speaking for each side of the equation. Inside ourselves we converse, while knowing all the time it is outside and an other that begins new conversation. Our limited language of signs gets us some place, though even those with an extensive flair and repertoire are limited by time and style and taste and interpreters. The brain keeps bouncing its millions of talents this way and that, a repertoire in itself with its own terms of reference, its own term time. But what we want, what we must have, comes when it comes as though it were a gift: an isolated shower.