Twenty years ago: I am on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. Dolphins freeload, weaving in the pressure wave off the bow while we drag the fishing nets aft. We dump the slapping flipping take on the deck and start sorting the critters. I am taken by a squid, the spots on its skin, phosphenes pulsing off and on, racing across the surface, flickering and signally wildly as it dies.
More presently: the sense memories flare up and fade out, race over me in a desperate attempt to preserve love, their fire and glow trying to stave off obsolescence: the voice that comes from somewhere over my shoulder and it has his timbre, the same cadence; on the train sitting across from me, his wheat colored hair, his thin skin showing the tender darkened smears of a paucity of sleep; this crowd that contains someone with his smell and it turns my head to only strangers.
Tonight: the air smells like water and I look out the window to the lights in the buildings behind mine. If those soft glows had their axis shifted, if they were horizontal instead of vertical, they would be the jellyfish reflecting moonlight on a Texas beach and the flaring and fading memory I have would be just the squid expiring in my hand.
posted by ttractor @ 6:54 AM
4 Comments:
Oh, the Botanic Gardens. Lovely.
But lovelier: this post. Spots of time indeed.
thank you. but it does sound like the beginning of some really bad poetry, no?--this fading love is like a dying squid. or those impossible portions of verbal acuity tests...fading:dying as love:squid. this makes me laugh at myself, which is always a good thing!
oh! but this photo is not from the Japanese Garden at BBG. It is just another from my walk to and from the subway and work.
I keep thinking those four blocks will stop yielding things that are interesting, but then again, some things I pass over and over trying to figure out how to shoot them.
I have been totally frustrated by the aqua of a portapotty standing behind an orange construction net. every day it refuses to tell me how to organize it, coalesce into something tangible. grrr.
Oh, whoops. I was feeling all confident about my ability to recognize, and then I had a flicker of "well, it might be some other bamboo wall" just before I clicked "publish." Ah well.
Ooo, aqua and orange. Aquorange. Orangaqua. Orangaqua has a nice ring to it.
I am devoted to bad poetry.
Post a Comment
<< Home