It rains. It continues to rain. I am cold. I am curled up under two blankets, one a mere thin sheet, and another, a thicker scratchier one. The thin sheet serves as a buffer for the thicker one.
Simon referred to our rain as "warm" when we were taking the dogs for a walk and the rain continued to mizzle down relentlessly despite a few faux retreats, but I find it cold.
Sure, it's not as cold as the rain in England (or even Australia for that matter) but it's still cold enough.
I realise that part of the reason I continue to write this after so many years (OK with one significant break) is that when I look back, I want to capture what I was thinking about or feeling at any one point in time.
But that's not right. I mean I don't say everything I am/was feeling here. It's about 10%. Besides, that's like wrapping experiences in a sort of skin, forcing it into a particular shape, instead of letting it all hang loose, all potential rather than firm experience, codified as such.
If everything is a matter of perspective, then, aren't I limiting my perspective? Would I come back to these same memories like an anthropologist or a Sheldonian Spock and go, "fascinating" as I re-read entries and think, wow, where was my mind at, to write that?
Would I feel a nostalgia for days past, for a feeling, a turn of phrase, a state of mind, an Anne Sexton ballad, you know, that sort of thing? Why do I feel compelled to sit, swaddled in my blankets, at 1.49am, typing out these words that mean nothing?
Am I recounting an experience?
No.
Am I sharing an insight?
No.
Am I amusing you?
No.
Am I amusing me?
No.
Sometimes I wonder about things. Like who's on the other side of the Matrix pulling my strings. If there were someone, would they be ordering me to continue to write this in the face of all that's lost?
So much lost.
So much.
Dunno what's there anymore.
You take it day to day. No continuity. Sweep up the broken glass so no one (especially you) steps on it.
Make it to tomorrow.
Sometimes you mess around with to do lists but since nothing you do makes a difference, has an impact on anyone around you, maybe sometimes you just sleep.
The body aches, the bones creak, the heart is tired the soul is weary and all around you there is the death and the promise of death and the fight to stave away death until you have carved out prettier words for a gravestone, until you have more to add to the eulogy.
Don't spring the eulogy on my Mummy last minute, OK, she has already said she won't be doing any more.
In moments like these I wish I could disappear into a Bacchic haze. But I promised myself that no liquor for Lent, so you know, there's a challenge there.
After a great rain a formal feeling comes
The blankets wrap around me like a womb...
First chill
Then stupor
and then, the letting go.
5 comments:
38 days, and counting.
"...Sheldonian Spock..."
Lol. Trust me, I will find a way to use that awesome term in a sentence next week... :)
Not sure if words alone can bring good cheer, but the following words never fail to bring a smile. Can you guess the author without the assistance of Google?
It is a chilly god, a god of shades,
Rises to the glass from his black fathoms.
At the window, those unborn, those undone
Assemble with the frail paleness of moths,
An envious phosphorescence in their wings.
Vermilions, bronzes, colors of the sun
In the coal fire will not wholly console them.
Imagine their deep hunger, deep as the dark
For the blood-heat that would ruddle or reclaim.
The glass mouth sucks blood-heat from my forefinger.
The old god dribbles, in return, his words.
The old god, too, writes aureate poetry
In tarnished modes, maundering among the wastes,
Fair chronicler of every foul declension.
Age, and ages of prose, have uncoiled
His talking whirlwind, abated his excessive temper
When words, like locusts, drummed the darkening air
And left the cobs to rattle, bitten clean.
Skies once wearing a blue, divine hauteur
Ravel above us, mistily descend,
Thickening with motes, to a marriage with the mire.
He hymns the rotten queen with saffron hair
Who has saltier aphrodisiacs
Than virgins' tears. That bawdy queen of death,
Her wormy couriers are at his bones.
Still he hymns juice of her, hot nectarine.
I see him, horny-skinned and tough, construe
What flinty pebbles the ploughblade upturns
As ponderable tokens of her love.
He, godly, doddering, spells
No succinct Gabriel from the letters here
But floridly, his amorous nostalgias.
OK I read it three times, but not a clue. Can I Google now?
You may! She's one of my favorites. It's hard to believe so much can hinge on the choice of a single word.
Plath? Yes, indeed.
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