proseII

This is from mid-September, I think. I thought it wasn't good enough before, but it's starting grow on me. So I'm posting it.

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I'm hungry, tonight. I was composing imagined histories, earlier. Weaving stories out of the wet musk of greenery, and twined desert cities, and the light for thirty windows, set at odd angles form the staircase. I was dreaming of darker skies, and the arctic scent of winter--snow blown down from the mountains and the distant hum of the heater.

I was thinking of traveling, of raveling circumstance in the gentle grip of a hundred miles of freeway. A thousand. Ten thousand--until all the points of light had been woven into a single constellation. Of changing my face, pulling one of several dusty cloaks from the trunk I have hidden elsewhere.

I am listening to old music--retrieving the memories of what others have lost.

I look up at the graceful branches of the eucalyptus, but they are never quite the branches of the eucalyptus behind the wooden fences, where the mourning doves would perch and sing at dawn.  I look up at the stars, but they are never the bright-edged souls I saw over the dark bare branches, never the tenacious guideposts I saw walking over the hills, fingering their way through the haze--lamps left for some ancient navigator, that we have borrowed for our own strange purposes.

I look for poem and find nothing but paragraphs--look for sense and find nothing but impressions.

It's hard to be caught, hang limp, in the long slow, swoop of your soul. I never take pictures with people in them, for good reason--and even now, I find them to be indescribable. I could take words now, would like to, and use them to cast shadows on a wall, for the sake of company. But, I would be left with nothing but empty outlines, and the darkness between them.

I felt the presence of something last week, blind and unborn, waiting below the nervous frantic shaking, below the teeth of world--for just a moment, standing on the sidewalk, at the foot of another nameless building, I felt that there was something, shivering with unrealized potential, at the far edge of my range. Stranger and far more gracious than I could've hoped.

I called up the coast, and had it confirmed--she told me she had seen it, too--and that she was resting in the shallows of the 5.

When I can fall in love, again--I will figure these hours where I can--in gratitude, not desperation. Not to smear dust on the wall, and hope that the gods are moved to mercy, by the blood. But to let the time concentrate itself, until it becomes simple--and brighter. Glass and iron--and a window to catch the sun, shatter the light across the marble. To write well, I think you must love your subject, whatever strange shape your devotion makes for you.