On the long sand
midst the joshua or ocotillo
or cholla or saguaro
a single blossom is
precious
A seed, hard as the stone
on which it falls
is life
in the water that only appears
never to fall
You cannot walk to the field
and grab life
for yourself
Say it is dead
but is it struggling
when, if you look hard
it flourishes
in spite of you?
On real people. Or people who become real.
On the hatred of a certain author’s Neat Houses lined neatly together on neat roads that go nowhere.
On magic. Not spells or incantations or charms, but those under which people fall, perhaps becoming real.
Writing a girl as a photograph. She cannot be unless edited with chemicals, ink, blurred parts and frowzy hair, intentionally for anticipation of a tenure, articulating homework not her own in a thrift-store pullover that indicates cats and discarded memories and fingerprinted lenses. Her jeans, too much last century, forming perfect lines so unlike this century’s sprayed-on “jeans” that reveal perfect lines.
How does one manage disheveled, dusty, baggy and still exist? Essentially a fly-paper that attracts weirdos that are not real – do not exist. But the voice and the reticence and the averted gaze whisper “unreal” while it all seems unintentionally intentional while the self-same stickers affirm what seems to be what she is [not] saying without ever mentioning it.
By a passing admission of cats, both dead and alive, and simply not here. Reading rare monographs on tin-type and cyan as if everyone else should be. Introverted enough that a sudden press for paper-encased foam might foment a quaking cry later on after dinner (if she can get through the mundane-ity of that, even). Expert in balancing exposure suspended in a didactic public revelation, over clothed and perpetually frumpy, but clearly not beneath all that. Jeans are always telling.
___________________________
About somebody I’ve met before, but don’t actually know who enough to write about, but thought about enough for a few minutes, enough to write about. Word paintings don’t have to be right, if they still make a picture.
Observed two friends meeting over coffee. Perfectly normal, perhaps young mothers escaping for quiet time. One said something that moved the other to abruptly leave her seat, jam herself down right next to the first. They became a half-tangled knot of intensity. The one had some serious thing, and the other had switched to intimate mode in order to hear, touch, apparently to comfort her friend. I could not guess what was involved, but it was enough of an event to bring me to reverie-focus.
Beautiful
Seeing is becoming more story, more beauty, grave breathlessness. Poetry, always poetry. In things.
I was mildly jealous of the pair, but more beset with a wistful gladness that they were so close and real.
Beautiful.
Music must, for now, be that. Grave, serious, but ephemeral, like unfading blossoms that are light, airy, but still vanish in a blink. Morning tea works, or embers and snaps at the end of dusk, or at twilight when sleep is not acceptable. Does so much need to change, as I am half-sensing? It is as if there is a departure looming.
Whole life immersion. Is that a thing? Pondering what it might look like to be in life-long treatment. A bit pessimistic, I admit, and too excessive, I am pretty sure. But all this led to an [almost] perfect set of ideas.
Choose to be fed up with the frantic-frenetic-crisis environment that seems entrenched all round. Things: Transform it all into place. Of peace and beauty. Of green things and warmth and beauty, crowded and cozy. Of smells and faeries and blossoms and (gasp) decor. A haven as Imladris, not the greys. Of the timeless, rather than an end of time. Not departure.
Our time is short, and the Lord tarries only and shall end things. But if I have accepted the long game of theology, is it reasonable to embrace it here? For as long as the Lord tarries?
Imperfection. She is not there. I am always here, envisioning an audience for my creations. It’s never sufficient, or even somewhat nice, to be my own beneficiary. What is a self-created haven but a feather-bed self-immolation? We speak of dark things, of self-washing and saccharine thickness. Of the Bath-and-Body-Works of self-pampering, thick, scrape-it-off miasma of cloying, kitschy underbelly fat, rendered.
No, but fragile, earth-smell and water from the breast of the lily, all that is lace and ephemeral and safe, though it sparkles through, between fingers that are learning not to clutch and beg and cramp.
Analyst, co-conspirator, cohort, and critic. That will not be the obvious always was the wrong choice for every reason and legitimate. So I pray, pessimist-wise, and dark dark darkly, doubting all of it , for said entity to drop in my lap from the aether. By which I mean not in my lap, for I am increasingly disinterested in the superficial, instant gratification, ebonite falsity of lap-sitting, and her fetid sister, the side-hug. Such things cause greater frustration, lies, and perpetual cringing. Send that sylph, diaphanous, and not the fattened cherub of sordid stickiness.
Ponder beauty in its manifestations, share it to others. Bohemian, perhaps? Weak and fragile and flighty and dismiss able? I have regressed and find a more educated, grave, deep-chested nineteen-year-old stranger who hardly needed to shave daily and could not string two meaningful words together despite good intentions and authentic dreams. Hilarious, for then there was no sense of seal-and-matrix, of her that actually still does not exist in any way then while at least here, now, there is a sense of what should have been and what could be wished for.
Moved, by a graveyard, where she is coming, alive, with a song to sing someone to sleep and rests a tired head between the white swell of her breasts – and pretty much who should care if all that is too explicit for the pages of any dream.
Therefore, shall loose all these feather-things; vent, if you will. All that I wanted to before, though I boned that up myself on top of all the dismissal, rejection, loathing, and un-respect. I had what was not, and I failed with it at the same time. So here is that effulgence in shadow and occasional tears behind the sketchy wooden door [see, outhouse, n, – a shanty hastily slapped together to provide a modicum of knowing-smile privacy]. Not a sickening bloat of green-hued, steamy forest that is cloying and overdone. But of do-not-touch-me moss and lace that might well disintegrate under any but the most careful touch. The nick of a craftsman’s blade, perfecting the curve of a delicate wooden sculpture, or the caress of one too afraid to mark the all-too-already marred surface of the broken one. That tender touch barely felt but immense as hiding in the mountains.
Paper Screams 