Three seers

Three seers, if you like, or three seekers: the tiny, rectangular old man, possibly newly arrived from a China Southern airbus -- the one who was pushing a trolley of suitcases on the narrow feeder to the ring road when we left the airport behind him; the one whose purple-skinned fingers were pulling at the wires at the back of a burst-apart analogue television in the gutter opposite when we parked; the narrow-faced, white-haired one who, only a week earlier, had blurred one word into another, not from dementia -- or perhaps also that -- as she developed the most beautiful stories of envy and longing from the glass of red wine she had been given at the door.