If day has to become night, this is a beautiful way (more cummings)

What if mountains filled the valleys into flatness eternal? No sunsets over the cresting hills from the rich troughs of the valley. Driving down the back roads and up hills towards distant learning, a didactic repose, the trees form a tunnel of red-yellows, and leaves layer the road in a carpet for kings, regal red. I'm not the king these trees shed into death for, nor he who resurrects green come spring.
I'm not a naturally forthright personality. Up through high school, I lived under the impression that all sympathy I'd experienced, outside my family, was counterfeit. Not just sympathy, but curiosity. When someone asked, "how are you doing?" I responded "I'm doing well", because it is the quickest, surest way to countermeasure interrogation missiles. And that's how I saw them. Not as loving queries or curiosity, but as time wasting inquiries of the vein, "it's really pouring outside, eh?" That's hardly even a question at all.
I started writing about the same time the fortress of my personality cracked as jericho from friends hooting and trumpeting about the walls. Even so, I still naturally conceal myself behind these characters. Even in my journal, my private writings, I don't allow my writing to expose my inner dialectics. This has changed, gradually, but what is there to fear so much from these things?
I was walking around today, touching the bark of the trees and running my fingers along the leaf-veins and needles: sugar maple, japanese maple, white fir, quaking aspen, dogwood, cherry, apple, hazelnut.  Mixed, the days are, uncertain of the season. Or maybe uncertainty is the season, from ghoulishly beautiful silver days of striated (nimbus) clouds and stormy popcorn (cumulus) clouds, or sunny cloudless skies wide as the eyes of eternity. A diffidence in days I mimic in my musings.

1. It dived like a fish, but climbed like a dream
2. Whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it's always ourselves we find in the sea
3. (and feeling:that if day  
has to become night  


this is a beautiful way) 
- ee cummings

I've been on an ee cummings frenzy lately. I went to the library and powells, and waltzed my way through as much poetry as I might manage: Frost, Cummings, Wendell Berry, Keats, Yeats, Carl Sandburg, Maya Angelou. I think my next free weekend I'll likely do the same. I'm dragging myself inch by inch into a poetic world, but my self fights every step. I don't interact with writing in an intuitive manner. I'm not an intuitive person, which inhibits my art a great deal. I'm a Bean, not an Ender.  If someone enters the room and leaves, I already cannot remember what they wore, what their hair color was. I'll remember everything they said, and the effects on my mentality of the gestures they made, even when I cannot remember the gestures. I'll remember each analysis of conversational pathing I invented as they spoke, each deft manipulation. I'd remember how often they smiled, but not whether they had braces or not, so intrinsic my disability.
Hence, my weakness with poetry and poetic inventiveness. You must integrate yourself in intuitive leaps and bounds into the world encompassing. You must spirit your mind away, and linger only with the heart sometimes. You must feel beyond the boundaries and fly into the dreams of colors and shapes, the very platonic forms behind reality. Poetry is phantasmagoria, shadow shapes on the wall - what do you see?

Closes and Opens

A spectre haunts my frailty, a ghost I've forged of devilry. With dreams, awake, entwined, cold as listless lies and lives, phantom echoes of ancient angers arrive and cruelly wave as passersby, then smile. The fellowship's shattered, into ashes thick in black winds. Every cat's tail of nine slicing through my mind leaves paw prints of crimson mysteries behind.  Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals / the power of your intense fragility. Lovely letters, in the dark night storms of survival, when I've jettisoned my soul, and dreams die derelict on ocean's floor, while others simply shipwrecked float as flotsam food for fishes - can you hand me the rope? You are waiting for another, my bathybic apparition, no matter, dear. Watch me flounder here. Salty eyes flood unnoticed in the sea, married to my maritime eventuality. This is a sodden and sorrowful swan song, as your look lingers across another open ocean, not mine, with spring sky eyes and stolen time. There's love in those eyes, not for me, not for me. And it anchors deep within my veins.

There's gold in grey days and silver in the skies. The sunny rays are forsythia smiles and the trees marigold denials of icy chains. The purple gates of dawn blossom wide, and an old locomotive thunders across the heavens, leaving billowing trails in cumulus piles.  What if a much of a which of a wind. Here is the rain awaited by leaves with all their trees and by forests with all their mountains. People stopping and listening - when the sea's overhead and below, where to go?
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd sand
Listen, as the finches flit and sing, the newts wiggle beneath the drops of rain which plunk against the lake-drum. Pay close mind to the vessel cutting gently through the loose-leafed wine of this intoxicating inland sea, above which the hooting owl with offset eyes swoops into the underbrush with frightening speed, and the goats clopping up the hillside stones bah and bleat away this autumn squall. Nothing so beautiful as sunlight and rain tricking light into rainbows across the lake and between the trees. There's love here, quite as strong as the infinite, beating brisk and bright.





"Do you believe in dichotomy?"
"I do, and I don't."


somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
~ ee cummings

Nobody, not even the rain

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
 and opens;only something in me understands
 the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
e.e. cummings

There is something sinister in infinity, and magnificent. The stars cease their winking charade and stare: cold, incessant, pitiless in eternal surround.  Space is not a sea in which we float amongst the heavens, but a hole, an absence, crushing ever inwards.  The fragile veil between us and without: beautiful; the journey into the void: fraught.

            Lost stared vacantly behind as his home, all their homes, receded into a glowing point in space.  He didn’t know why, but watching the digital streams of their departure made him feel… something.  Maudlin? Solemn?  It was getting more difficult to do that these days: feel.  The echoing thrum and whirr of magical machinery whined behind Lost as a counterpoint to the numbing silence of the stars.  The control room faintly glowed with nurturing light, a laughable counterfeit sun.  Overhead, a glass dome glimpsed into forever as the vessel drifted through space.  Lost paced his rounds throughout the control room: watering the hydrangeas, rhododendrons, roses and disparate vegetation that survived the apocalypse to accompany the journey to a new home world.  Numbly, he noticed once more that the peas produced nicely, but the tomatoes seemed reluctant to produce under the fraudulent light, the squash curled inwards, strangely subdued, and none of the flowers, save the poppy, ever bloomed any more. 

            The ship was enormous, far larger than the simple requirements of its occupants.  The control room itself was a large, circular room illuminated by ambient light and filled with diverse flora in maze-like rows and obscure patterns: flowers yonder, vegetables by that edge, fruits and trees collected by half-fence over there - a semblance of composition.   

            The room contained an unpleasant quality of contradiction: light, yet lacking in sunny disposition; full of fruit-bearing trees, a garden, and a trickling creek, and, somehow, still devoid of life; silent, serene, yet deafening with incompatible whirrings and clammerings of machines;  and, of course, the faux skylight above a thaumaturgically sealed semi-sphere of glass revealing a sky without sun, and unblinking stars.  Esoteric machines lined the arced walls and mounted screens detailed different portions of the ship and outlying space.  Inside, no breeze stirred the trees, no sunlight graced those leaves, and no animals nested within their solemn branches.

            But the grief of the trees and the melancholy dirge of the creek were naught compared with the pathos of the man as he numbly walked the ritual of tending the garden, a mindless machine.  There was no décor in his dance – though a strange dance it remained. A faint trace of emotion occasionally flickered across his face as he glanced upwards, furtively, towards the monitors on the far wall, but no more than a glimmer. 

            Mounted slightly above the arcane machinery that sparkled on the far wall from the entrance were monitors where every motionless sector of the entire ship was revealed: the kitchen with its giant cupboards, plastic counters and quasi-marble floor tiles; the storeroom crammed tightly with miscellaneous “everythings” for conceived eventualities: tools, wood, fittings and bolts, rope and thousands of constructive materials and machinery. There were many rooms emptily displayed: the bathrooms, bedrooms which doubled as pods for emergencies, hallways, the leisure and exercise room.  Each empty, isolated, and pathetically morose in their vacancy.  Only one other room contained occupants: the infirmary.

            It was to this monitor that Lost’s gaze periodically returned.  Clean, and staggeringly so (as infirmaries are want to be), the too-white room contained eight cocoon-shaped vessels like organic sarcophagi.  Arranged in an octagon with slabs at corners, each vessel rose from the floor by a single, slender metal bar - almost unnaturally. At the focus of the circle, a giant IV drip suspended from the ceiling, drizzling a purple liquid through an octopus of slender feeds into the compartments.  Tiny ice crystals formed on the outside of the feeding tube as each appendage conjoined with the capsules.  An aura of argentine light shimmered around each of the sarcophagi, and in all save one of the vessels laid a comatose male or female: three males and four females total. Magically sealed, they slept as beauties for the journey through space, interred as they were in their separate sepulchers. 

            A careful inspection of Lost’s face when viewing this screen revealed nothing spectacular: no magnificent revelation regarding the logic behind these furtive glances.  And after each tiny distraction, his attention shortly returned, and nary a glimmer of that curious look remained.