February 2005 Archives
Once...
Outside in the evening, when everything was blurred deep white -- and more falling. Slow, like feathery dreams touching down and adding to the pale sweep. Tree limbs going two-tone: growing ghosts on top, with jet beneath. The sky was so low that it was breaking around you. Swirling. Mixing with your breath. The ground's glow rose, whiter, more perfect by the second, as the sky dimmed to lavender. Then an oddly luminous violet. You could almost see the veins and crystaline angles in the flakes.
And the silence.
It swelled like a tide.
I grew still, and closed my eyes. I made my breath as slow as the falling. After a while, I could hear a soft whispery rustling. Quiet as cat's paws... When I looked again, it was darker than I had expected. Night was taking the details away and I was starting to feel the cold beneath my skin. I left there, then.
But I still remember the sound of snow falling.
Now, I am drinking water and wishing it wine...
I keep a notebook into which I jot things. Recently these have been fragments, for the most part. Once upon a time, though, I wrote this:
"And suddenly (though the world was still bright) there was a scarcity of butterflies."
I always thought that it could serve as an interesting start to a story. But this makes me sad.
I'd hate to see them go.
I am tired but wound like a clock spring. Weary but unwilling to sleep just yet. I feel vaguely displaced.
A week ago, we passed through a parking lot. Tumbling dreamlike in the Pittsburgh sky was a large flock of sea gulls. Hundreds of miles from the ocean and deep in our Winter, the gulls were beautifully out-of-place. I smiled to see them.
Now I kind of feel like them.
I don't know where I'm at.
I wore socks with hearts for Valentine's Day.
Outside, the rain sounds like an on-going sigh. There is a glass (mostly empty) of red wine near my right hand. The news is on TV. Fourteen has nearly slipped to fifteen. Middle of this short month.
I'm tired.
And I am wearing my hearts on my feet.
Valentine's Day is silvered -- and backgrounded with the sound of water. I have found quite a few ways to describe gray, though I tend to drift toward favorites. This day could inspire new exploration of ashy imagery.
I had a daydream of pallor and perfection earlier. When the day's hours were not tipping toward sunset, I saw a hill of ice. Now, with the light soon to sink behind the horizon (like a puddle of rain melting into the earth, perhaps) comes a colorful pheasant, walking down my shiny-wet driveway.
Valentine's Day: and the lush reds are kept to cards.
...So I sat alone in the quiet and thought of you.
I will soon, too, but I wanted you to know.
You were missed.
Tuesday is a stack of windowpanes. Each layer of glass blurred slightly. Silvered by dust...or drizzle. The melting smear of snow, here -- mist from a low sky, there. Each pane moving you back from the day. Distancing. Stepped away from it like that, grayed and ghosted, it becomes like a dream of a day. Or removed further still: the memory of a dream.
Sound is the most real thing when you are looking through those faded layers. Sensation and vision are shadows -- but music still has clean edges.
I'm listening to Madeleine Peyroux sing "between the bars".
It's clear and perfect.
They say it's going to get slushy, later today.
Even now the snow piled along the sides of the roads has grown smudged and smeared with dark grit: cinders and salt, engine exhaust, mud. Pure white darkened to watery black. The more evident sun has pulled those pale blankets back, revealing watery brown earth, bare branches, cold iron. Things are grimy and sodden, now. This is Winter in her messy phase. Her depressing aspect.
Snow is so transformative and beautiful, so otherworldly when it first falls.
But now...
