An odd little rainstorm shows up from nowhere and these sudden clouds rack up overhead and as such derail my plans. Only rains for twenty minutes or so and then the sun comes back out. Only it's like being in the middle of something etc. and now that middle is gone and it's somewhere else to be found and so gets lost in space. What to do? Start something else? Settle for tomorrow?
But I wish not to hurry off to nowhere, especially in particular, (!) and so just sit here on the back porch - the back porch mountain of solitude hanging out in a small town of influences - and take in the air as it happens.
A truck out on Route 7 is using it's engine brakes against the neighborhood streets and it sounds like someone stuttering. A rapid vocabulary of sounds, brokenness and hesitation, the more you apply the sounds the more there is a hope maybe...
Everybody lives faraway... and it's only a phone call... and it's not like they are required at the moment or anything... but they just live faraway...
Try and concentrate on what you were doing - but instead look up at those clouds with their frosty white peaks like mountain tops riding atop the packs of twisted and layered gray mass that spin into a kind of wool that seems classic and penumbral and stupid and gathers shadows from the wind and has a storm packaged within - and you think you're never too old to engage in doubt, never too far removed to have a portal onto a problem...
Get soaked in the process...
Ah the first aster has bloomed...
Today without fail I still can't ever imagine heaven...
Hell is for suckers mom used to say...
Everyday there's a need for something like a tissue in nature that runs way below deep and so rips out your heart and then hands it back over to you to begin again...
And tomatoes keep rising from the garden like the fruits of paradise turned over and made into salsa and canned later for soups when the dregs of winter hit ...
Last evening at the ice cream stand... the tourists took so long to either make up their minds or get their money out and get out of the way that the sun went down as though no one might notice the full difference between an ordinary breath and a small silent bravo. Fathers called out for gleeful mindless children climbing across tables and jabbing one another with cones. Mothers lost in phone calls called out to fathers to harness the children as dollars worth of chocolate went down to the fate of gravity. A silly thing really but utterly worth it. To have one's own chocolate and watch the sights off a summer evening... sitting on the stairs that lead down closer to sea level... as though practically invisible... gleeful mindless people walked over me to get closer to the lake like American meatball heros appropriated from a source of endless life like vacation idleness and the un-lived terror of their failings and split into a simple human mask that grinned and spilled cold soda on my shoulders in the process... Gold blue light settled on the water. The ferry boat pulled into the harbor like some character from a picture book. A brilliant blue sky flared out into the sweet blanket of night and exposed those first few stars that grid the light in space like fireflies. Seagulls in teams went mad over a discarded sundae that lay on the grass all wasted rose and lemon and stripped mined sugar from those pleasant creeme machines.
Get rid of the anxieties in life and what's left? Leisure? The screws of disappointment?
It's that time of year when the garden goes unruly and you feel a little scared about it and the plants flop in whatever direction they take. Grasses take over like wands casting myths. After a long season you need to let go - but wasn't I the manager of this dirt just like three months ago and so was cheering on the natural order of things? So you take a look one day. And the whole organism is on its own without you. There doesn't appear to be an I within this equation that you do anything about.
Some years I take the time... I tidy it up.... stake the tall late flowers like the asters and wage a kind of mesmerizing air against the weeds that want so much against my own desires...
This year I guess I'm inclined to let it all go and watch. It's all quite beautiful. And I really don't know why.
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