flight.

coral.

The Great Firefly of the eastern range, rising and metamorphosing from this lime bean, plastic-like texture, to a strange gold, and then this fantastic magmatic red, and then splaying down the ridgelines, burning the granite and blue schist–a perpetual burning, as an Oseberg ship burial–it flings infinitely, although sometimes lingers, as if it were fizzled out already, as if we are dwellers of shallow oasis waters, as if we are biding our time, binoculars focused intently on our ebbing moon, as if the compasses now point to a true west, as if our forefathers knew this all along, but wanted us to have hosted such an affair for ourselves.

Well, I thought the pianist was decent. And those people seemed pretty nice.

So like when the sky begins these early rising changes, like an oak leaf in the fall, and the wind breathes gently on your neck like a sleeping love, and if we can sigh a heavy sigh at this display of grandiloquent kindling, of G-d, and the lightness of existence–a soft patch of sage–of having our tracks filled in with tiny windburned snowflakes, of wearing your father’s watch, to keep this time, to be never more alive in time, to howl off the highest of bluffs, or the lowest of valley, or to be infuriated at man’s imposition, this constant tempo, and to yelp silently underwater at the coral, and know that these ships sank for something.

Please, G-d, let it be for something.

Really, I have no qualms with how our trains run. But I do think there are those voluptuously pink evening skies that cool and try to fight off the darkness, and then appear these stardust-burdened blacknesses that force your sophomoric mind to gander and finally come to terms–that the world is a black tie occasion, and that we must remember our etiquette, for every meal can be as ambrosial as the last, and that the eventide matinee is always, always playing.

Just for us.

phoenix.

The morning redness over the eastern treeline, veins of marigold and juniper berry blue, as well as also this singular iguana skin green cloud, drifting amiably through the early haze of low-floating clouds, all turtle-like running against the hare of time.

It feels as though spring is tapping its heels lately–signs of life, oddly enough. Winter’s paring outside my cabin window…yes! a nest of stellar jays, their feathers are the bluest of daytime southern skies, navy in streaks like a police man’s coat, eyes an irregular grey ocean water, it soars quickly across the field in front of me, the frosted sky, clouds are technetium ad unrelenting with this still bright light, blinding yellow in our retinas.

And see, this is good.

Do you see trees that are dancing there? Are the people like a rush of fresh river water, collecting in pools and leaving the warmness for the upstream struggle? Do they still stand under the abundance of lighted buildings and displays, tranced, such a center of the world, is it not?

I remember some quite late eves admiring the alleyways of Soho and watching people from the corner of Bleecker and Bowery leaning against the ironworks, their coffee’s steamboating vapors, and me wishing I had a reason for being there among the seismicity.

Do you feel like a phoenix?

The light from your faces in variegates of blush red and deep ember against the blanket of dark night.

solipsism.

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”

- David Foster Wallace, “Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way”, Girl With Curious Hair

paresis.

 

There’s often this paresis that follows me most evenings, threatening to overtake my limbs, just after the sky cools in a muddle of grey and the inside of a toasted almond, and then like but almost closing up in the blackness of a pupil.

And as I think of the sheer grandiosity of the vagueness of these particular eves, when even the kindliness of the pines morph to my temperment, mirroring my mortal extremity by shrieking with the wind that runs through their shadows like a wild mare.

This is a valediction of all we have so painstakingly mulled over for the time our little coils of consciousness figured out how to make shaled snails into combustion smoke.

This terrible silence could be a ladder to divinity.

It strings up our hearts like parachutes in a blurry marigold desert storm. It is bothersome, as though we had known all along, this primal distilled silence, and it traps us delicately like a gossamer–we twist, we try to shake it off, but we only become more and more entangled by this joke of the universe.

It’s been there, the entire time. And in all of our seemingly senile petrification, we must tell ourselves, over and over, as the dry plum morn burns in the east:

Don’t be afraid. This is how it was, and will always be.

paralysis.

There are some exceptionally pallid evenings just after the big hot egg yolk above has been done for hours flinging parabolically and is ready to settle down as if with a good, good book, or in a billowing hammock of the western mountains, or a quiet sojourn after a large meal, and is solaced with light streaks of beet roots and in some cloudier parts of the sky marbled with dollops of pink bubblegum, as if being chewed ever so slowly.

And then there is this utmost frightful silence–palpable, like the taste of a wooden stick on the back of your tongue, and God is telling you to open up and say ahhh–and the only extraordinarily vain thought that is allowed to enter your paralysed circuit board is how lovely the smell of bitter juniper and spruce, such a beautiful eyesore that amiable Jackson Pollock sky. These all combine to mirror the moment that the universe was seethed, and how it must have racked its silent brain cave as to how it would like to present itself in front of its dusty progenies, each eve, for eternity and onward–this resurgence of fire against the cooling east–and yet we still have the audacity to compare this one to that one, to retouch the red sky that melts to brown like chemicals in a gutter. We’re little pettifoggers with our own distinct pair of reflectors and our hearts strung up like little toy airplanes on a mobile.

It is only our shift to watch over the long teal eastern, with clouds as easy riders, clouds as spindrifters, clouds as a glass of spilled milk.

This is only our first and certainly most ungraceful dance to the best fucking jazz we’ve ever heard.

פרק שירה

The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.

- Thomas Berry

Trees

נפש

And then Mikal asked her, “Do you know what it means to have a soul?”

She didn’t reply.

“The word soul derived from the Greek verb to blow,” Mikal said coolly. “Irina, meanings get tossed around over time. Centuries ago, the word soul was the root word for binding, associated with the notion of being bound to death, as in the ritual of binding, or restraining, a corpse in a grave so it does not return as a ghost.”

Irina didn’t stir.

“The Greeks and the Jews believed that our bodies are vessels, and our soul is what gets passed on from this life to wherever we go next. They translated the word soul as a vital breath of life. From God, perhaps.”

Mikal paused, letting this settle for a second.

Then she cut in. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“You know, the Ancient Egyptians mummified the remains of their loved ones and inscribed the sarcophagus with words telling us that to speak the name of the dead is to make them live again. To write something down is to make it come true.” Mikal spun the globe slower and slower. “Everyone you ever knew eventually is in the story of your life,” he said. “You, Yancy and even I play a very small, yet, exceedingly significant role in the lives of people who we may have not even met before. People who you pass by on the streets without even thinking about. We get stuck on the subway with them. We wait in the same lines and breath the same air as them. And these seemingly inconsequential moments might turn out to be some of the most important ones of your life.” He paused, tossing the globe around forcefully. “These people are all a part of your story. Try to remember them, because they remember you.” He noticed Irina looking at the envelope out of the corner of his eye. “People leave their stories scattered about the earth, like that one you helped piece back together. And stories are most of the time filtered through many storytellers along the way. Names are confused. Facts are misconstrued. Or intent might be lost. But the important part is that they’re passed along. We breathe in and out as we tell our story to others. Then the other person breathes, and our story gets passed on and on, forever, making up the story of all our existence. Breath by breath, until our very last.”

– from “Sioux Falls, Left Part”

 

(almost there, like, almost almost)