Far From the Best Mood

[rejectomorph]

I've never been to New Orleans. Maybe bits of it will come to me over the next few years, dissolved in raindrops. At Catalina, they used to have these glass-bottom boats that allowed tourists to see the fish swimming in the water under the boat. Maybe they can have such boats running up and down Bourbon Street now. Or maybe Katrina will swing wide and smack Houston. One never knows. It is fire season here. The town could burn down tomorrow. This would raise the temperature but slightly.

I used to worry about disasters when I was a kid. I would lie abed at night, sleepless, sniffing the air for scent of fire, listening to the creak of wood that might presage the collapse of the house, aware of every vibration that might indicate the onset of an earthquake or an imminent landslide that would carry me amid wreckage of plaster and shingle and rent floors downward with tumbling furniture into the abandoned quarry behind the house. Then I would go to sleep and wake the next day to the mundane routine which no event ever prevented. Was I relieved, or was I disappointed? To this day I don't know for sure. I was at times a pessimistic child.



Sunday Verse

(...which I may have posted before, but which suits the mood of the night.)

In Celebration

by Mark Strand


You sit in a chair, touched by nothing, feeling
the old self become the older self, imagining
only the patience of water, the boredom of stone.
You think that silence is the extra page,
you think that nothing is good or bad, not even
the darkness that fills the house while you sit watching
it happen. You've seen it happen before. Your friends
move past the window, their faces soiled with regret.
You want to wave but cannot raise your hand.
You sit in a chair. You turn to the nightshade spreading
a poisonous net around the house. You taste
the honey of absence. It is the same wherever
you are, the same if the voice rots before
the body, or the body rots before the voice.
You know that desire leads only to sorrow, that sorrow
leads to achievement which leads to emptiness.
You know that this is different, that this
is the celebration, the only celebration,
that by giving yourself over to nothing,
you shall be healed. You know there is joy in feeling
your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen future,
so you wait, you stare and you wait, and the dust settles
and the miraculous hours of childhood wander in darkness.

---

Comments

[mistersmearcase.livejournal.com]

I used to worry about disasters when I was, uh...32.

[marseille.livejournal.com]

I've had blizzards and long snow-ins in the winter. The only hurricane I ever experienced I actually missed, having inexplicably slept through it. This was a northern, Long Island-type hurricane, nothing like this week's. Still, lots of trees and branches down, and I heard nothing.
Now, ice storms? That I know about.

[rejectomorph]

Even a northern, Long Island hurricane can get pretty bad. Luckily, that doesn't happen very often- though global warming will probably bring such storms north more frequently in the future,
their impact aggravated by rising sea levels. Sooner or later, the world will see storm surges flooding some of the streets of Manhattan.