Lyrique

Thunderstorms rage outside as I listen to melancholy musique, tearing up at the somber poetry and its symmetric outpour. Do not decry those tears; rain seeped through the window into my soul. I pen, in the silence that is the storm.
Where I stay up all night / And all that I write is a grey grey tune
Even the dim light of this laptop screen draws moths towards the window - night creatures eager for light. The bats soon swoop in for the feast. A great silk moth latches onto the window, and in my fright, I thought it a bat. Are they here for the light or the shelter beneath the eaves?
Are you looking for answers / to questions under the stars?
Dimly, the street lamps flicker through the valley beneath, illuminating needles of heavenly weeping falling onto unyielding asphalt. The souls of a thousand faces, spread across countless spaces, struggling, fighting, praying. I imagine a web of intersecting colors, illuminated by the cracks of lightning splitting this sky, a network of all our spiritual supplications. I read the Genesis, I read Psalms 23, I read Philippians 4, and I read Revelations 22. Listen, the storm is a song.
Oh I'll never know what makes this man
With all the love that his heart can stand
Dream of ways to throw it all away
Dreams collide, dreams of balloons and skies and transparent goodbyes, but distant, distant, as though a painting of a photograph of someone else's lives. It is a speculum of silver and stained glass, showing clearly nothing of love and hope and love, and the drums of the stormy night rage unending, though it is not rage, but the humming of bass strings.
All I ever learned from love / Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.
Small rivulets burn their whispering paths down the hills into the valley, into the creek in the hammock of the hills. I suspect the salmon leaping upstream to love and death, inextricably bound, mind this not. I can hear their splashes, a counterpoint. A coyote howls, an owl shrieks, the creatures stand still. But not the rain. I smile, and wonder what whispers the wind to comfort the clouds. May those words be carried far and fair this night.
Won't you come away with me tonight? /  We can fly past the moon and the starlight
What the water wants is hurricanes,  / and sailboats to ride on its back
And I ride the storm into slumber to swim with the salmon, gallop astride the lightning, and follow these rivers unto the vastness of the ocean, so I may gaze in its reflection and witness the sky.

And then, there are no words. Only the weeping of violins as bows breathe across silver strings.

Muse and Music

Etymology is a secret passion of mine. Super secret. I admit that I never liked taking Latin in my preppy middle school life, and only later realized how efficacious Latin can be in "guessing" meanings or deriving understanding with knowledge of roots. One of the recent words I glanced into was music. The obvious root word here is the same as that for muse: "Mousa", or even "Musa" (Greek and Latin respectively).
The muses were the 9 Goddesses of literature, art, and sciences.
The suffix -ic generally just means "of" or "about" or even "pertaining to". If you use the word "acerbic"(root word acerbus: bitter, sour), adding the suffix means "pertaining to sour" or "of sour taste", if you will. It might be easier to see with alcoholic: pertaining to alcohol. Music, therefore, is pertaining to the muses. The most well known example of muse was perhaps in Homer's Odyssey.
"Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy."
Music, then, pertains to those domains of the goddesses aforementioned: literature, art, sciences. There was a belief, or a mythos, that literature, art, and the sciences stemmed from these nine goddesses. Homer was being inspired into his musical rendition of Odysseus' travels. I love music, but it is not where I'm inspired. I delight in violin compositions, classical orchestras, folk traditions and the many and varied forms music assumes in our diverse cultures. Every now and again, when no one is home and the sky's turned dark and speckled with stars, I retreat into my room and light some scented candles, unpack my guitar from its casket, and pluck at the strings until I imagine I'm singing with the heavens.
My artistry regarding music is limited, but I see it everywhere. I see it in the stars as I approach the valley: twinkling, celestial lights spanning the twilight sky; I see it in summer trees, spring rains, winter fireplaces and blankets while charcoal clouds sprinkle outside; and in the autumn colors. I think that's why I appreciate the Silmarillion, and its metaphorical beginnings.
But certain nights exist, certain times, when the original music seems... closer. When the harp strings of heaven and the fluting of earth assemble in ensemble, and walking outside you forget that your bones are tired from running around - a long week. When you forget, even, those trivial worries that plague our everyday, and live. I can imagine myself anywhere in the world, with these stars, staring up and seeing nothing besides. On the cliffs of Scotland, waves breaking against stone beneath; in the heights of South America, among the ruins of Machu Pichu as an anachronism stuck between the ancient and the now; in the steppe of Mongolia, endless grassy fields and hills; in the desert dunes, cooling sands on all sides.
I'm everywhere, I'm nowhere, I'm between sleeping and waking, and the Sabbath rest begins.

Fields, Fruit, and Valleys Full - Dreamy Thursdays

The day started as a Fleet Foxes morning, wobbled its way into a Sufjan Stevens afternoon, and collapsed into a Sigur Ros denouement.  After work it was smiles and Mumford and Sons babbling with me on the drive to drop off A's stuff and pick up my prodigal pillow.

This morning, the early mountain mists sifting into the valley quickly burned off in the summer blaze, droplets tumbling to the ground and turning the grass into opals on the early harp strings of sunlight. Turtledoves chortled, starlings shrieked and dove between the homes before gliding into roof slats, and high above, the hawks soared on the valley's warm updrafts. Plums now sit ripe on trees of like color, and blackberries sneak tendrils across streets, burdened with berries and bees. And figs, even figs, gather along snaking limbs. It's like Tantalus' wonderland, full of fruits within reach, and the river slouching through town. Lazy summer days, even filled with work, are marvel-filled.

I dreamed last night of a cabin in the woods, old-parchment moonlight piercing the canopy and sparkling against the windows. A bubbling burn trickled through the glade, and low rows of herbs and vegetables in the garden behind the home wavered in the gentle breeze. A hart nibbled at the grass at creek's edge, head lowered without fear, while an owl hroo'ed in the branches above, gold-ringed eyes watching the forest entire, hunting instincts prepared.

The door opened into a cool abode, lightly furnished. A rug covered a cedar floor, and paintings of icons covered the walls, replete with halos. A small twin bed built of beech wood occupied the corner opposite the fireplace in which an ember-red fire sparked its last. Books littered the floor, old tomes filled with burnt-marshmallow parchment sitting atop crumbling scrolls. Knobbly, white, wax candles dribbling into bronze saucers were strewn about the floor. The scroll anchored to the floor by piles of tomes read, "There and Back Again... A Hobbit's Tale".
I think the scroll beneath it was a Virginia Woolf (a room of one's own. go figure what that says about my psyche)

Well, sounds pretty idyllic to me. I'd live there.

Foxtail Moon

A long week, but it's over, and I'm rolling in single digits now. A foxtail moon rides the sky low, near the horizon in a dull, ember orange. Dreams cling close to earth this night, sleep light, for morning dawns not nigh. Fae is ever near when the moon's not half ours. Only a sliver sits here, gibbous there, and whether waxing, waning, a crimson moon bears its will in midnight tides.
It's a song, don't you see? A song singing itself from creation's morn until destruction's eve, and into fall. It's a siren song into love and devastation. A nail lune, fingers buried deep into the sky, a golden yellow lulling me to sleep.

Au Rêveur

An ancient ruin looms along a seaside cliff. Salty spray strikes stone; the cliff solid sits, turning not its face. Music, a percussive swash slaps and spumes while flurried winds flute and harp of warmer climes. The lighthouse atop the outcrop beams back at the moon and silvery sea. Pixie shapes likes shadow flames caper here, amongst the fairy lanterns and footsteps of spring, the poppy and the pimpernel, a lilting aria almost audible, or do the grasses simply swish?

High and low crest the tides below, faintly distinguished against the night owl's saxophone, the cricket violin. Everything is familiar and not, and you wonder if it's all real, knowing it's more than real, it is a truth. And the shooting stars above contemplate those below, a love ne'er brighter shone.

Celestial, empyrean domain, beatifically displayed in the overlapping waves, the churning brine that clasps tight those behemoths of the deeps, the lantern fish and bovine manatees, or those angled beasts of jagged teeth, fins. Ionized particles charge along the horizon, patterning the world's edge in crimson and green. This is only a night, only a dance of dreams.