Gods and Dark Fields

The Grand Union Canal leading out of Uxbridge. No, something smaller. A river. One of those manifold rivers that creased and circled this Metropolitan terminus station town. Early summer, when the air is rich and heavy and glutted with all the seeds and leaves and green. Shadowed river. So much foliage. Walking by this darkened stream, this June-brook, and I don't know when. 1993? 1994? The air tastes of river-earth, and the sun-dried path I'm walking on is narrow, cracked, and invaded by weeds. To my left is a ditch - and I only know this because I have been here in winter when one can see the ditch. Now it is crammed full of plants; nodding heads of cow parsley, scattering of daisies at the base, fevery dandelions. I imagine there is dark water beneath, secret  water. Does it flow, does it trickle, does it sing? You don't get summers like this after your mid-twenties when they became mundane things burnt through by work and all that tedious shit we fill our lives with to survive. When you're young - younger - these times are filled with the potential for something. On the other side of the ditch is a fence, and on the other side of the fence is some kind of industrial landscape. A place filled with squat factories with nameless purpose, chimneys, pipes, windows. You can only see a fraction of it, because there is so much foliage. The edge of these factory-lands is riven with trees. A breeze moves through them, makes you think of the sea, even though you're miles and miles inland. Breathe in the air, and it tastes like lightning to a god; sleep, wine, sex, youth, ghosts, and of lying in a dark field somewhere you can't remember waiting for it to get light. Dew on your back, and it makes you think sweetly of winter, or of autumn at least, or maybe those cool and rainy early days in a mild spring. You have to go back, back to the ground floor rented room in a town you've been trying to leave for years. The path stretches on into an infinitesimal distance. How promising that path looks, how mysterious and divine, and forever... but you must return back, and in that rented room of a town you are soon to leave you find cooling shadows and feel something loss. Sleep, dream. Try not to think of paths that lead to destinations never visited, only ever rumoured to be on horizons. It would have disappointed you, you tell yourself, and in years to come, when you are not young - or not as young - or whatever age-related appellation you wish to apply to yourself, you remember you were right. It would have disappointed you. That mysterious river, that shadowed path, would only have led to a glum housing estate, then after that through those flat scrubby fields robbed of poetry or mystery. The industrial estates, while only glimpsed, may have been full of a dream-like obscure splendor  but seen, they would have been planes of flat, sunshine-y glass and security guards, and those neat little bushes that remind you of Sunday garden centres. Still, you think, exhausted from another day at work, you'll never really know, because you were young then, and things might have been different, and you'll never know because you left that town that summer, and anyway, you'd been desperate to leave that town for years. You don't really want to think how far back that time was anyway.