Saturday, February 26, 2011

I have not seen a sunrise in a long time. The first early rays cross the sky while I sleep, briefly waking to close the blinds. I have not seen nature's beautiful orange liquid spill across the hills, filling the day with morning. I sleep.


I am awake when the world dreams and dozes. I m awake while covers keep husbands and wives snug and happy. I read. I sip my wine. I watch the clock and check the windows for pale signs of dawn. Soon the blackness changes and charcoal replaces a sky awash with stars. Soon that fades too and enough of the distant day's sun illuminates the trees. I hope to slip beneath a blanket before their limbs are clear and the day begins.


I have not seen a sunrise in a long time.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

A friend sent me a video with two skeletons running toward each other. They are on a beach and the light is high. They cast short shadows. Tall, misty waves crash and foam onto a rippling surface that passes stolen sunlight across its crests.


I see through them as they run. Their shadows are wisps and lines of something incomplete. Closer, their arms almost touch.

They collide. Two skulls drop last as the bones shatter and fall away.

Who were they?


A stone in the distance changes shape as the sea around it covers its sides, then recedes.


Were they in love? Were they children playing? Do we keep seeking the things we want after we die and the stuff of our existence fades?


Saturday, February 19, 2011

We all start off small and smooth. We grow into our scars and lines. We become the broken things that lay weeping at night. Quietly, little tears like thieves find a crease and slip from the corners…


Fifty degrees in mid-February is a gift. It's an early spring day in the middle of winter -- it's gold in the river. But by nightfall yesterday wind struck, sucking away the warmth to give us a frigid morning. Tonight the wind slashes at trees and grabs at untethered things. Bags rush across frozen heaps of yesterday's slushy snow and bounce like trashy tumbleweeds. Flags shred and snap. Branches crash down on the house like bombs. Once the light dies a thermostat rocking against its post outdoors reads 10 degrees.


Fifty degrees and other astonishments -- A man turns on his barstool to face me and I realize it is my friend M. Thank God he is here. Thank God he is smiling. He is another flash of gold in an uncertain current.


I tell Jerry about M. and we are both happy for a minute. Later I rest next to Jerry while he sleeps. A rotten weepy tear escapes and slips across my cheek. I remember being in college when I would cry like that at night. I think I left my sense of humor there in Long Island. I guess I dropped it in the outgoing tide. I remember my family visiting and we walked on hard winter sand. It's so cold that I could snap my ears off and put them in my pockets, my brother had said.


Time for some wine. Time for a book. Time to forget about the angry sad things that have their own magic gravity.


Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Reflecting in the moon's small misshapen sphere is stolen sunlight. Nighttime snow glows and our rutted path is marked by little shadows in a row where our feet pressed through deep snow. Every day the dogs have to earn their time in the woods. From the end of a training leash they walk with me indoors, turn with me unexpectedly, and never know when the door will open after they sit. Stay.


With patience thin and thinning I work with them in the mornings and when I return home. After many winter moons cast light on snow that will fade as daylight and warmth creep back into the world, the stinky dogs will do as I ask. One day as the rhododendron buds now face up to a frozen sky begin to open, I will walk on the road again and jog to the end and into the forest. Eventually, as the frost lets go of the ground and dissolves with the spring, I might have dogs that glance my way and follow my lead, rather than ignore my frustrated pleas. Come back!


Winter's deepest moments are already over as sunlight stretches its time and pushes dawn over hillsides surrounding Lake Zoar a blink earlier everyday.


According to the U.S. naval observatory astronomical applications department, the sun and moon movements are precise. For Newtown, at longitude W73.3 and latitude N41.4, civil twilight began at 6:20 am. The sun's transit, when it's highest overhead, occurred at 12:07 pm, and civil twilight ended at 5:55 pm The moon's stay aloft was much longer. Moonrise was at 1:21 pm the preceding day, its transit at 10:02 pm. The moon will set at 5:22 am, roughly one hour away from sunrise.


For less than 60 minutes the sky will blush with sunshine and by 6:19 am -- one minute earlier than today -- a watery orange wisp of sun will soon lift itself over the crest of dark hills.


As the Earth lopes around the sun, the moon circles us as we stare overhead to see its face.


What Orion defends and the solar system reveals is a gibbous moon with nearly all of its face complete. Some days we see a sliver, and some days the moon hides, leaving us with darkness and time.


Always in motion and always swinging on invisible lines is a universe somehow and somewhere set to move endlessly. Eternal, over and over again.


Monday, February 14, 2011

Love. I could say many things about walking through fire and risking life and limb, but love is really just the heightened sense of relief that someone else will occasionally do the dishes.


Happy Valentine's Day!

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

So stuck on the goddess, I have to see her for myself. Her image is a prism:


In her belly the world grew and swelled. Once it rose into heaven before her with stars swimming around, she squeezed bits of wax between her fingers and threw them on the ground.


To these little specks that would become people, she said, wherever you land, I cannot lead you or make you happy. I give you the world and life. Find your way.


She holds the moon in her hands and aims its borrowed light into a night sky. Those little men will see the curve of her face in the stars, and mistake her hair for moonlight. She fades and changes for the morning.


From within a blinding sky she is a shadow. Men will tattoo her shape on their skin and wait.


The goddess is imagination. Men must stop following and suffering and reaching for treasures their hands are not shaped to hold.


Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Post 207

My thoughts feel small, as if my vocabulary shrunk in the dryer. That machine devours socks, so why not intangible little words held in place by other intangible things like memory.


Rather than think tonight about the dogs, the training, and the image of myself standing inept with a red leash in my hand, I poke through others' words. On the Internet I read blogs -- little daily rants that are often flecked with gold and insight. When the dark gets darker and the weight grips us with iron fingers, when pills, booze, and overpowering frustration drive us into short-tempered angry fits, we finally set down the heavy void on paper. Trap it on a page, kick it around, and share it. I have an old friend in Pa that deserves the world, if only the world -- the web of people connected to her through jobs, loans, family, friends, and random chance, would just spit a little life into its rancid heart and help out.


______________________


He calls me goddess, and I blush like a fool.


The goddess of…wreckage trying to sweep her life back together using a toothpick in the dark?


Driving to work today after another morning with the dogs on a leash: sit, stay, stay! Shit….I think I have an answer.


To my poor, flawed mortal, to the eager man who grasps at temptation and error like shiny diamonds, you will struggle eternally to answer unanswerable questions like finding your soul, keeping it safe, preserving its light and energy to endure after your body's death. You will feel pain and heartache for your entire life -- the worst wound will be regret. Yet the determination and hope that fuel your power to strive in full armor and wrath against these truths is the gods' gift to every floundering mortal. Catch us if you can.


You are beautiful, but so many things are out of reach. Happiness is hidden in your heart and in the world, but we the gods won't tell you where to search. We can see it, however. It is real.


In my dark basement with cold soaking into my feet, I think that a glass of wine is more appropriate than pondering gilded myth.


Where is the sun?

Monday, February 7, 2011


My heavy, cold limbs and fingers are bent with work and hurt. Tossing a cracked shovel into a mound of snow, I moved past the dogs sniffing and licking at water in my clothes that had turned frigid with wind.


With runny eyes I probed the ground forgotten below piles of old snow torn with ruts -- my jagged path. Moving toward home I pictured booze bottles under bar lights tossing angels bound in amber and maroon shafts. They paint dripping trails across knotted honey pine.

At the bar B. asked me, so, you like wine in the box?

Yup.

Why?

Because, when I fall asleep on my bar stool and bump it over, it won't break.

Oh. You are my hero, he said. Drinkers love drunken fools -- I was and will be…


As I pry a cork from the bar's house Cabernet I think of Lily. Again I imagine what life will be like with dogs reined in and behaved. I imagine the hill I'll climb wearing roller skates through sand to get there. Passing by J. in the bar's kitchen I say, ya know, I have a theme today, Oh Please, Just Shoot Me.


By the way, a Bunny hopped into my blog recently. Any takers?




Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Day and night fight quietly for the sky. Every year they take the same turns pushing and pulling, oblivious that I stare at the horizon with a clock in view to make sure the sunken sun's milky rays -- quickly watered down with darkness -- linger a bit longer than yesterday.


I don't dislike the winter, it's just hard to move through stunted days that blink so rapidly into night. Warmth is a naked, gray abandoned thing. The post upon which I haul up the wilted good spirits is lost beneath snow. I slump. I fell asleep leaning against Jerry tonight after trying again with the dogs: sit, stay, down, stay, and around and around I went, without really understanding what these exercises are supposed to mean.


Later as I sit up and look at Jerry, I say, sorry…


Taking a little nap? he asks.


Why am I so tired?


I tell you all the time, you don't sleep enough, ever.


For some reason I remember my Vodka Days. We were living in Shelton and trading time between his house and my apartment. The second I opened the front door after work I grabbed a glass and went for the ice cubes. I passed out every night. Too many dark and depressed moods for too long -- like winter -- and I needed to shut my head off.


Someone said that the first day of spring was 51 days away. I grabbed the calendar from my desk, flipped to March and looked for the little italic letters saying, Spring Begins. I counted. Forty eight more days, but that was a day ago, before the ice encased us all and the sky kept dropping cold, slushy shit on our heads.


I'll meet with the trainer again soon. I hope to have a grasp of what I am doing, and some steps of progress accomplished by the time the snow melts. I


Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Post 204

Today I want to open a book and let my stress leak onto its pages. I want to drink a sip of Cabernet to drown the churning thing in my stomach. With a book's dry feathered pages flopping under my thumb, I will find the phrase I remember from yesterday, and start again my nightly process of shoving all the shit out of my head, transplanting another world of voices, people, and words into a space bulging with anxiety.


As January 31 faded into the first day of February during the dark hours at night where secrets, myth, and lore play and we fail to see, light would soon chase them away. Snow fell again on frozen branches. Birds still chirped as the snow turned to a misty drizzle. Little lunatics.