of layers and masks. If you ignore enough paint chips, wall cracks, leaning doors and scratched glass and can keep adding to the costume you get emergence, you’re at home. Then you have to learn the mood of the rooms and spaces, the random and predicted creaks and clatters, the stair ascents and quiet zones, all inside the roaming of a few private rooms. But hidden under the paint and plaster, the rough fabric does its sentry duty while you flick through Satori in Paris – oh, Jack, there’s barely a page goes by without you calling out for a cognac stiffener, and like Ginsberg said, the ghost of your father leans hard upon you, out tramping the roads – thinking of Brest and how you just missed it in the Brittany mists, a shore too far. I lie here musing on Jack’s words and warnings, my own half-forgotten journeys, the mudslide build up of the years, what chances might yet come.
