Soft Silly Music's blog

Thoreau Blog

http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/

"Hypos"

"Oh, I'm a weak and lonely sort
Though I'm not sailing just for sport
I've come to feel
Out on the sea
These urgent lives
Press against me
I'm just a guest
I'm not a part
With my tender head
With my easy heart
These several years out on the sea
Made me empty, cold, and clear
Pour yourself into me"

--"Girl in Port"-- Okkervil River

Divorce

I guard the echo of us stubbornly
Like some great and venerable ash heap
Like some root-dead stump that, in a fit of sentimentality
I've refused to convert into kindling

Yet we, long past, are beautiful only in death
For our growth together was galled and ugly,
A chimaera of competing species, forced
Together, an unlovely, alien thing.

But since we are no longer a threat,
We are a curiosity, pondered and prismed in new light
Beautiful for our unprecendented oddity
For the unlikely wonder of existence.

That "us" is then commemorative rather than generative
Means that I can gently care after and shelve the past
Smoothing gently the feathers on its broken neck
Burying it in my garden for the roses to protect.

South Carolina

 I don't think it is possible to live in this state until you have truly made peace with the heat and can entertain it in your house like a familiar and gregarious guest.   It isn't heat like the Southwest, where you forget it's hot because there is no humidity.  Here, heat languishes.  It drapes itself across our bodies like Spanish moss;  yet, with preternatural heaviness, inundates our blood.  Thus, when it departs, you have little defense against the winter chill and, as a result, a kind of seasonal Stockholm syndrome aches in the aftermath.

Just the weather on your window

I think this will be a watershed year for the deconstruction of personal mythology.

"Why buy the cow when you can get the colonoscopy for free?"

"So, what you are telling me, Jesi, is that your third date with him was a colonoscopy?"

bitter

I've become that person who hates seeing happy couples because they remind me of everything in life I actually wanted to last.

dying to say something unanswerable

I ache for an equal. A friend.  A comrade at arms.  A partner in my crimes. Even if it is not love.  Even if it is just a friend.  I ache for someone to come into contact with me whose intensity balances my own.

I ache for someone on whom my words are not wasted.  An equal in verbal courtship or just banter.  Someone who plays at metaphors and figurative language as I do.  Someone who wants to understand what, in the small faultlines and cracks between knowing, they have not fathomed.  I want someone who aches too, with curiosity and eagerness.  Who tumbles into conversation and contact like large, clumsy puppy and who does not take the hunt so seriously as to forget to have fun along the way.  Who lives on ideas and the adventure of being alive.

Shadows and dust

Today, it's been cleaning in prep for the party.  I've noticed that, lately, in the absence of Maitiu, I've been rearranging things that I never used to touch or question.  

These days, I'm letting joy reach me in a way that I didn't before.  Because I was afraid of the inevitable and believed if I were here, loyal and unmoved by the outside world, I could prevent it.  I kept myself here with him.  I shouldn't have.  I shouldn't have let him move in.  I shouldn't have let him in my life to begin with.  Not like that.  Not what became.

Why is it that I can only remember a few fleeting glimpses of happiness with him?  I guess because the rest are tainted with his deceit.  I don't miss him.  I don't love him.  I just feel a queer nausea when I have to think about anything dealing with him.  I can't tell what it's from.

I'd say he taught me regret, except I learned something about me and what I need to be happy.  He had been everything I thought I needed.   And I was wrong.  Now I see the folly of chasing passion.  Passion is something you create when you find a person you can be totally unencumbered with and who wants to, likewise, create passion.  With Maitiu, passion was always the first thing to die when, actually, it should be the last thing to be born before starting a relationship.

Now I know what I'm looking for.

truth III

If you can't be honest with your self, you'll never be honest with anyone else.