petergabriel.com

There is a beauty and a sadness that walks by our good house. A graceful ghost hunted by his own reflection. He calls to her children and lovers from eras past who, growing up on tea and rice have not yet looked upon with their own eyes, the histories of the lumbermen and spaceship builders. This ghost wanders the hearts of trees. and the shrubbs, yet strangely leaves the small vermin to fend for themselves, preferring instead the hunt for the darker shadow of the twilight hours that hide from the sun in the morning stones. Few people in the village here pay much heed to the old man who walks the beach with the early morning chill on the tip of his nose and whiskered chin; and fewer travellers leave anything but piles of rubbish to think about after they have left. Names and house numbers, all the same after centuries of shipping crates stacked upon the docks of the sea, wait for the incoming tide. .and high above the beach sand, in the towering glass coffins of warm soft cushions and smooth dead wood lay the families of the merciful, who sleep with little trouble in their silent slumbers and quieted screams. Meanwhile the ghost wanders, and there in the museums he sees their lives, and in the books he sees her face, body upon body in the paintings and remembers why, as a living being, he shook his fist at her words and moved off into the stones. =