Reset Forty-Nine, Day Twelve
Jun. 4th, 2023 04:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rejectomorphWhen I wake for a while in the mornings now and look outside it seems the light is less bright than it once was. There always seems to be a vague overcast. Perhaps there is. That's how it used to be in Los Angeles in May and June. Maybe as climate zones shift it gets more like the regions south of the Tehachapi Mountains here. Or it could be that pollution is growing worse here, on its way to Southern California levels.
Or maybe it's just my eyes going bad, or badder. I know my night blindness is fairly advanced now, and reading grows more difficult almost by the day. I expect them to get worse. But it makes me feel as though something is going on that I'm not being let in on. Sometimes it's hard to tell if I'm detaching from the world, or the world is detaching from me. We're both getting older, after all, though it still seems likely that I'll die first. And I must say it would be a damned inconvenience for me the other way around, and I'm pretty sure the world won't give a rat's ass when I vanish from its indifferent face. Yeah, I should definitely go first. It's best for everyone.
Anyway, the mini-heat wave is half over and will be peaking today (with a high of 96 and a distressingly symmetrical nocturnal low of 69) and will be spent by Tuesday, when we get back to a more spring-like high of 80 and low of 61. I can live with that, but it remains to be seen if I can live through July and August. It would be a shame to survive the torrid months and then die before the nice fall weather arrives. Do I always say that? I can't remember anymore, and don't feel like looking back. I think I'm getting tired now. I'll get this out of the way and go to bed.
Sunday Verse
by Peter Campion
One of the feelings which returns so often:
I mean the way that winter afternoons
call back those childhood sulks at the window.
That incessant need to sketch in the people
behind the lichened shingle of facing houses.
Now, when evening gathers, the walls conceal
no lion tamers lounging with the lions,
no divers plunging inside an aquarium.
Just a catch in the stomach like falling:
sweet emptiness . . . which others must also feel.
Even hours after, mothers and children
crossing the bright street by the supermarket
cut such vivid profiles. And they have a fierceness:
like ravenous hummingbirds who couldn't care
about the thorns they thrust through to devour
the little beads of honey in the flower.
Or like themselves . . . Lucent apartments shelve
into the hills, the whole volume of sky
falls on the spaces between, and passing strangers
move with the urgency that darkness
lends them: their skins much brighter against the expanse
of towers, suburbs, and fields they pull behind.
Or maybe it's just my eyes going bad, or badder. I know my night blindness is fairly advanced now, and reading grows more difficult almost by the day. I expect them to get worse. But it makes me feel as though something is going on that I'm not being let in on. Sometimes it's hard to tell if I'm detaching from the world, or the world is detaching from me. We're both getting older, after all, though it still seems likely that I'll die first. And I must say it would be a damned inconvenience for me the other way around, and I'm pretty sure the world won't give a rat's ass when I vanish from its indifferent face. Yeah, I should definitely go first. It's best for everyone.
Anyway, the mini-heat wave is half over and will be peaking today (with a high of 96 and a distressingly symmetrical nocturnal low of 69) and will be spent by Tuesday, when we get back to a more spring-like high of 80 and low of 61. I can live with that, but it remains to be seen if I can live through July and August. It would be a shame to survive the torrid months and then die before the nice fall weather arrives. Do I always say that? I can't remember anymore, and don't feel like looking back. I think I'm getting tired now. I'll get this out of the way and go to bed.
Sunday Verse
The Population
by Peter Campion
One of the feelings which returns so often:
I mean the way that winter afternoons
call back those childhood sulks at the window.
That incessant need to sketch in the people
behind the lichened shingle of facing houses.
Now, when evening gathers, the walls conceal
no lion tamers lounging with the lions,
no divers plunging inside an aquarium.
Just a catch in the stomach like falling:
sweet emptiness . . . which others must also feel.
Even hours after, mothers and children
crossing the bright street by the supermarket
cut such vivid profiles. And they have a fierceness:
like ravenous hummingbirds who couldn't care
about the thorns they thrust through to devour
the little beads of honey in the flower.
Or like themselves . . . Lucent apartments shelve
into the hills, the whole volume of sky
falls on the spaces between, and passing strangers
move with the urgency that darkness
lends them: their skins much brighter against the expanse
of towers, suburbs, and fields they pull behind.
