rejectomorph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rejectomorph) wrote2023-04-23 04:49 am
rejectomorph) wrote2023-04-23 04:49 am
Reset Forty-Eight, Day Fifty-Nine
It is flat here. All I see here every day is this fragment of the mini-metropolis. From the back yard looking north I see the tops of a few trees and two rows of utility poles and their wires flanking the bike path. At night I can see a tall streetlamp where the bike path crosses a road. To the south and east I can see the apartment house and its parking lot and the hedge that conceals its swimming pool. Sometimes I hear people splashing in it, but not very often. I see the cars in the parking lot, and see them come and go.
When I go down the driveway to the mail box I can see this short street and its small duplexes, the road curving out of sight to where it stops at the busier through road. Above the rooftops of the duplexes across the street I see the upper floor added to the old department store a few years ago for offices, with a low, hip-roofed central tower vaguely reminiscent of a prison watch tower. In a narrow gap between the swimming pool hedge and its neighboring house I can see a sliver of the through road where a car will occasionally pass. Across the apartment house parking lot I see a stretch of freeway on an elevated berm, cars and trucks passing by faster. In the sky I see clouds, and at night sometimes the moon and a couple of planets, but most stars are washed out by the town lights.
This is all there is, day after day. On the Internet I see digital simulacra of reality, images of other places that might as well have vanished from the earth ages ago, or be someone's dreams not yet realized. For me, daily reality is these rooms, this screen, the sounds from outside and from the speakers, and memory that fades almost hourly. I can smell auto and diesel exhaust, other people's dinners cooking, sometimes perfumes from the laundry room, once in a great while a skunk, rarely a nostalgic whiff of cigarette smoke, as though the last five decades hadn't happened.
What does all this mean? Probably nothing. The endless old tale of the idiot, which in time— probably soon— I will no longer hear. But the last couple of days have been so balmy, and I've needed only one light blanket when I've slept, distracting me somewhat from even the now-perennial aches, that I've almost been able to imagine myself as pleased as the birds I hear chirping in the nearby trees might be. It's not a great life, but its probably good enough. It could be worse. It probably will be, before very long. For now, I'll have a nightcap, like some traveler no one will ever meet again.
Sunday Verse
by Carolyn Forche
Although you mention Venice
keeping it on your tongue like a fruit pit
and I say yes, perhaps Bucharest, neither of us
really knows. There is only this train
slipping through pastures of snow,
a sleigh reaching down
to touch its buried runners.
We meet on the shaking platform,
the wind's broken teeth sinking into us.
You unwrap your dark bread
and share with me the coffee
sloshing into your gloves.
Telegraph posts chop the winter fields
into white blocks, in each window
the crude painting of a small farm.
We listen to mothers scolding
children in English as if
we do not understand a word of it--
sit still, sit still.
There are few clues as to where
we are: the baled wheat scattered
everywhere like missing coffins.
The distant yellow kitchen lights
wiped with oil.
Everywhere the black dipping wires
stretching messages from one side
of a country to the other.
The men who stand on every border
waving to us.
Wiping ovals of breath from the windows
in order to see ourselves, you touch
the glass tenderly wherever it holds my face.
Days later, you are showing me
photographs of a woman and children
smiling from the windows of your wallet.
Each time the train slows, a man
with our faces in the gold buttons
of his coat passes through the cars
muttering the name of a city. Each time
we lose people. Each time I find you
again between the cars, holding out
a scrap of bread for me, something
hot to drink, until there are
no more cities and you pull me
toward you, sliding your hands
into my coat, telling me
your name over and over, hurrying
your mouth into mine.
We have, each of us, nothing.
We will give it to each other.
When I go down the driveway to the mail box I can see this short street and its small duplexes, the road curving out of sight to where it stops at the busier through road. Above the rooftops of the duplexes across the street I see the upper floor added to the old department store a few years ago for offices, with a low, hip-roofed central tower vaguely reminiscent of a prison watch tower. In a narrow gap between the swimming pool hedge and its neighboring house I can see a sliver of the through road where a car will occasionally pass. Across the apartment house parking lot I see a stretch of freeway on an elevated berm, cars and trucks passing by faster. In the sky I see clouds, and at night sometimes the moon and a couple of planets, but most stars are washed out by the town lights.
This is all there is, day after day. On the Internet I see digital simulacra of reality, images of other places that might as well have vanished from the earth ages ago, or be someone's dreams not yet realized. For me, daily reality is these rooms, this screen, the sounds from outside and from the speakers, and memory that fades almost hourly. I can smell auto and diesel exhaust, other people's dinners cooking, sometimes perfumes from the laundry room, once in a great while a skunk, rarely a nostalgic whiff of cigarette smoke, as though the last five decades hadn't happened.
What does all this mean? Probably nothing. The endless old tale of the idiot, which in time— probably soon— I will no longer hear. But the last couple of days have been so balmy, and I've needed only one light blanket when I've slept, distracting me somewhat from even the now-perennial aches, that I've almost been able to imagine myself as pleased as the birds I hear chirping in the nearby trees might be. It's not a great life, but its probably good enough. It could be worse. It probably will be, before very long. For now, I'll have a nightcap, like some traveler no one will ever meet again.
Sunday Verse
For the Stranger
by Carolyn Forche
Although you mention Venice
keeping it on your tongue like a fruit pit
and I say yes, perhaps Bucharest, neither of us
really knows. There is only this train
slipping through pastures of snow,
a sleigh reaching down
to touch its buried runners.
We meet on the shaking platform,
the wind's broken teeth sinking into us.
You unwrap your dark bread
and share with me the coffee
sloshing into your gloves.
Telegraph posts chop the winter fields
into white blocks, in each window
the crude painting of a small farm.
We listen to mothers scolding
children in English as if
we do not understand a word of it--
sit still, sit still.
There are few clues as to where
we are: the baled wheat scattered
everywhere like missing coffins.
The distant yellow kitchen lights
wiped with oil.
Everywhere the black dipping wires
stretching messages from one side
of a country to the other.
The men who stand on every border
waving to us.
Wiping ovals of breath from the windows
in order to see ourselves, you touch
the glass tenderly wherever it holds my face.
Days later, you are showing me
photographs of a woman and children
smiling from the windows of your wallet.
Each time the train slows, a man
with our faces in the gold buttons
of his coat passes through the cars
muttering the name of a city. Each time
we lose people. Each time I find you
again between the cars, holding out
a scrap of bread for me, something
hot to drink, until there are
no more cities and you pull me
toward you, sliding your hands
into my coat, telling me
your name over and over, hurrying
your mouth into mine.
We have, each of us, nothing.
We will give it to each other.
no subject
no subject
no subject