In
the sun hot afternoon of a late spring gathering
among
wildflower fields and bramble paths enroute
to
friendships and new acquaintances with whom
my
skin fits like an oversized ego shored up by
the
fallen timbres of my ever doubtful inner voice,
I
know I am not alone: the mixed bag certainties of others
become
discussions of art, music, meaning,
the
people that humanity itself should become if only we would.
I
feel like rearranged rubble, sliding down scree,
avalanches
of emotions from too many times and places
cross-thatched
into a straw man with wine-stained lips;
I
think with polar opposites and magnetic repulsions,
keen
to hear and understand, to speak and be understood, but also,
to
befuddle and mumble and distract lest I be known too well,
lest
people spook and vanish aboard unfinished sentences bound for other
rooms.
In
every subject I hear echoes of the same in others:
the
uneasy peace of self acceptance and self insufficiency.
And
in this state of eager anxiety, the warm, wandering breezes
of
the sun-borne arrival of evening bathes grace-infused stillness
through
drifting cloud breaks. We listen with one ear to insect orchestras
from
wildflower meadows and former farm fields alive with bird song
improvisations.
The
old stone house creaks with shifting arches and doorways that settle
around
piano
laughter, couched conversations upholstered in quilted patterns of
art and politics and
the
peculiarities and insights of absent others, male and female voices
parabolic with their
prismatic
opinions diffusing across the ceiling to the clinking of bottles and
glasses
and
deep dog sighs huffed above dust, displaced like tumbleweed across
throw-rug prairies:
a
straggle of friends upon a hillside in the decaying orbit of human
trajectory.
I
escape in the midst of someone else's mid-sentence. The need to be
outside:
outside
myself, outside the party, the drinks, the human condition itself,
deposits
me on the patio while the unseen river, veiled in greenery, ruminates
on
its ancient banks down the hillside falling away from where I stand.
The
scent of crushed tansy mingles with the waft of soup, bread and
cheese.
The
cicada rhythms of transformers hum like a drone to the percussive
talk from within.
The
beer and wine does not help the cause of balanced uncertainty,
however much it
loosens
the flow of associative communion; it pulls up short, an almost
there,
always
fled down falling shadows of continuous doubt, a jazz brew gumbo
of
gratitude and regret carried on the wind to the sound of commuter
traffic
and
the cross valley sandpit trucks in pastel shades of dusk plume
silence
as
inescapable as an angel with a sword on guard outside Eden, re-entry
denied:
redemption
blocked by the mechanical erosion of beauty clocking off for the day,
the
separation at the heart of the despair that raises the glass to my
lips,
the
impossibility of being alive without the grace imbued in nature.
The
harmony and alienation of the human creature hoping to speak
the
ecstatic whole of sensory and spiritual experience breathes its
living dayfall:
inhales
eternal belonging; exhales solitude as sadness personified while the
planet
of
this day continues turning from the sun until starlight rises into
sacred night
and
the anguished gale of longing shatters the glass
and
all the dark grief of being finds voice:
hears,
smells, tastes and feels
the
broken world groaning for the regeneration
of
the prodigal species at the top of the food chain.
