Reset Forty-Three, Day Twenty-Eight
Sep. 4th, 2022 05:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rejectomorphHave no idea what to say. There was Saturday. It got hot. I woke up in the afternoon. There was a sandwich made with an avocado that was not yet quite entirely bad. I distracted myself with music videos. Night fell and gradually coolness arrived. It is the last cool night there will be for a week. After that there's a surprise. A 17% chance of rain a week from Monday and a 24% chance the next day. As the days will still be pretty hot it must be a tropical storm, which means maybe lightning. That could be not good.
But I'm not at all convinced I'll survive to see it. I think a ghost got into the apartment and is trying to choke me. Or maybe my blood pressure has gotten really high. Or I'm coming down with neck cancer. One of those. I'm thinking ghost, so I won't have to change my diet. Assuming I survive, of course. It's moot. Everything is moot. Except that it's going to be too hot. That's not open to question.
Keep forgetting I've got artichokes. I'll try to remember to put out the pot I cook them in as a reminder. The little tricks you must use to sneak around dementia.
Sunday Verse
by John Burnside
I've visited the place
where thought begins:
pear trees suspended in sunlight, narrow shops,
alleys to nothing
but nettles
and broken wars;
and though it might look different
to you:
a seaside town, with steep roofs
the colour of oysters,
the corner of some junkyard with its glint
of coming rain,
though someone else again would recognize
the warm barn, the smell of milk,
the wintered cattle
shifting in the dark,
it's always the same lit space,
the one good measure:
Sometimes you'll wake in a chair
as the light is fading,
or stop on the way to work
as a current of starlings
turns on itself
and settles above the green,
and because what we learn in the dark
remains all our lives,
a noise like the sea, displacing the day's
pale knowledge,
you'll come to yourself
in a glimmer of rainfall or frost,
the burnt smell of autumn,
a meeting of parallel lines,
and know you were someone else
for the longest time,
pretending you knew where you were, like a diffident tourist,
lost on the one main square, and afraid to enquire.
But I'm not at all convinced I'll survive to see it. I think a ghost got into the apartment and is trying to choke me. Or maybe my blood pressure has gotten really high. Or I'm coming down with neck cancer. One of those. I'm thinking ghost, so I won't have to change my diet. Assuming I survive, of course. It's moot. Everything is moot. Except that it's going to be too hot. That's not open to question.
Keep forgetting I've got artichokes. I'll try to remember to put out the pot I cook them in as a reminder. The little tricks you must use to sneak around dementia.
Sunday Verse
Unwittingly
by John Burnside
I've visited the place
where thought begins:
pear trees suspended in sunlight, narrow shops,
alleys to nothing
but nettles
and broken wars;
and though it might look different
to you:
a seaside town, with steep roofs
the colour of oysters,
the corner of some junkyard with its glint
of coming rain,
though someone else again would recognize
the warm barn, the smell of milk,
the wintered cattle
shifting in the dark,
it's always the same lit space,
the one good measure:
Sometimes you'll wake in a chair
as the light is fading,
or stop on the way to work
as a current of starlings
turns on itself
and settles above the green,
and because what we learn in the dark
remains all our lives,
a noise like the sea, displacing the day's
pale knowledge,
you'll come to yourself
in a glimmer of rainfall or frost,
the burnt smell of autumn,
a meeting of parallel lines,
and know you were someone else
for the longest time,
pretending you knew where you were, like a diffident tourist,
lost on the one main square, and afraid to enquire.
