One is never alone in a foxhole.__________
It was less crowded before her.
__________
There is nothing quiet in this quiet.
__________
Even the scratch of my pencil sounds like a match.
__________
And I fear the fires of hell.
__________
This fear she brings. Every breath a white flag.
__________
I don't want to die.
__________
Tell her. Tell her I will wait.
__________
Her name is Mary.
__________
Tell her I will wait no matter how long.
He put the paper into his upper pocket. There was nothing to do but wait. The quiet of a waiting room. Each man lost within himself. Silent rituals, the brain on fire with every sound, war itself carving memories as canyons, blood for rivers. The bitter cold. The unending ballet of heaven's dusting.
As the silent flakes fell, just fell and fell and fell, I folded the paper and placed it in my pocket. He weighed more. I remember him weighing more, so silent, so still, supine then as now. And I think of him waiting. So tell me, what could I do? Could I not wait too? She pulled the yellowed paper from her pocket and placed it before me on the table. His handwriting, those lines. Calligraphy in slate. An elegant hand. I looked up and in her eyes I saw. I saw what lovers see, what they dream to know and I envied, as green as the clover, his bed of wait, nourished in the tears of her ablution.
You know, we are born into this world alone
and we shall leave it the same way.
And between those two points
is a great longing,
an ineluctable need to know
and to be known;
and I say to you,
if you ever taste of that divine fruit,
you will have no other,
you can have no other.
I nodded and I knew she knew of things I did not.
8 comments:
You know, we are born into this world alone
and we shall leave it the same way.
And between those two points
is a great longing,
an ineluctable need to know
and to be known;
and I say to you,
if you ever taste of that divine fruit,
you will have no other,
you can have no other.
I could read this, all of this, and wrap myself around it, as if it were some inked-upon sheath, to dress its worth upon me as when I sleep. But truth is worn in other places, it bears no garment, and tucks itself, untarnished, into the hollows, unseen. I'll wear these words above, tonight, there.
S., the elegance of your words, as before, as now, melts something inside of me, stirs something within and I feel a longing to know, to know how you hold a cup, to know how you bend to smell a flower, how you walk when in a bookstore. There is an intelligence and grace to your language, a sensual maturity born of an educated hand, of lip that has known the bruise of day and the bruise of night. You do this in a comment. And you do it time and time again.
With no elegance I will say this: you are ridiculously talented.
Your words remind me of a brilliant writer, long gone... yet here. A soul that is lingering, leaning down over the earth to gift us with his words... still.
And I can't put my finger on it. On who you really are.
Oh, and the image is amazing as well. If you created that too... ummmm, with no elegance I will tell you this - you have too much talent to limit yourself to Blogspot.
Spread yourself upon this world. Lean down and whisper your words... still.
We all want to hear them.
Athena, your comment intoxicates me. I think I'll be drunk all day, reading it like shots. In bed. Naked. Feeling the warmness of shadows growing. :-D
The image is mine, a fractal worked over in Photoshop, as is the one above this post. Thanks for noticing. :-)
She may have found this poem in his pocket too, in a small notebook he kept, perhaps full of poems like this one:
we are all layers
in the winter of life
haunted by the wool
as the wind plays fife
and
Dark trees conspire
their branches in cavorts
owls hooting too
hiding in their forts
so
walk with me my child
beside the path of water
flowers wave our way
fearful of the slaughter
Absorbingly, thought-provokingly sublime. A fortnight of sandy dawns and softly lit, tick-tocking eves for this post alone, I wish.
My dear Sunshine, you are very welcome. :-)
This post is too consuming to be able to formulate a comment.
When a post of yours is particularly moving, particularly consuming, particularly thought-provoking, as all of them are, my mind often instinctively creates a now familiar image, of a room so real it appears as though reality were dream, dream reality, as though I had spent many hours there, in a different lifetime if you will, the memory rising in sound, in image, in atmosphere, wearing a coat of nostaligia for what is known, loved and missed. It appears as a scene, always from the same angle, much like a painting or a photograph, a still frame, captured, but the warmth of a fire, unseen at this angle, and the passage of time are the two greatest impressions. thus it very much breathes. I could describe the lamp, the doorframe at the far end, the throw over the arm of the sofa, the table, the curtains, the clock, if I took the time every detail of this room to which your words transport me and in which we both come to sit, you always in the chair, I always upon the sofa and there it ends, like an introductory paragraph, and I am left with a sense of yeaning and knowing, how twillight hours would stretch, of quiet broken by even softer murmers of appreciation, observation. Or to put it another way, I dream upon reading a post like this of spending the time it deserves, every pause, every journey, with you right next to me. That is what I dream of.
I tried again and yet I wrote what I wrote only a longer version of what I wrote originally. I feel like listening to Tears and Rain, to be pocketed between this post and that music. Let this be reduced to a one word comment: sigh
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