Distorted

A moth who likes my light crawls the outside of my window. Its wings are pale and appear translucent as seen from the underside it displays to me. Its body is even paler, as are its thin, jittery legs. It crawls to the top of the window, then back to the bottom, again and again. The shape of its open wings and their intricate markings fascinate me. This moth is like a small fan covered with improbably fine decorative patterns.

Things that resemble much smaller or larger versions of some other thing always catch my attention. On seeing them, I'm sometimes reminded of a fever I had when I was very young, when I thought the room was receding from me, as though I were seeing it through the large end of a telescope, and at the same time nearby objects, such as the pattern on the bedspread, seemed to have grown to gargantuan proportions. After that fever, I never again saw the world in quite the same way as I had before, having become sensitive to anything suggestive of distortion.

Now things suggestive of other things catch my attention, and I get the feeling that this correspondence must mean something, but I never quite figure out what that meaning might be. Metaphor drives me to distraction. I am still fevered, by some childhood illness decades gone. The sense of unreality I felt then has never entirely left me, but lurks in corners of my mind until something with inexplicable familiarity stirs it awake. That moth crawling up and down for no reason that I can discern will never reach my lamp to the light of which it is drawn. It's trapped on the other side of the glass. I watch it, and picture its reflection in my gazing eyes.


( Sunday Verse )

Boo, Noise!

It was noisy here today. Everybody in the neighborhood had machinery going- trucks, motorbikes, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, that sort of thing. Thuggish Neighbor rode up and down the block several times on his tiny, unstable motorbike (almost like a little clown bike from a circus) while wearing nothing but shorts and shoes. I expected to at least see blood, or maybe even watch his brains being scraped from the pavement, but he never fell. Ah, well. The summer is young. There'll be plenty more warm afternoons.

It was very hot, too, with only a few scattered clouds to occasionally soften the sunlight. The sunset is quite nice, though, the line of clouds to the west having turned that especially lurid shade of red they sometimes become in summer. The sky being mostly clear, night may turn pleasantly cool. I must remember to water the sourgrass. Things have quieted down. Not even Thuggish Neighbor is foolish enough to ride his tiny clown bike in the dark. I'll be able to sit on the porch cooling off and listening to the water burbling from the hose. Maybe the all-day headache will even go away.

Red sky at night, sailor's delight.