Last night I was in bed by 11:45, but I had a hard time falling asleep. I took a Benadryl and started thinking about various stories I want to write (and some stories I will never write, but which entertain me in those in-between moments), and realized I had some verbiage I didn't want to forget. Instead of getting out of bed, I typed it up on my phone and emailed it to myself. I am not only amused by the technology involved, but also by the fact that apparently typing on my phone while lying in bed at 12:30 am, I turn into some unholy amalgam of e.e. cummings (no capitalization) and William Faulkner (haphazard punctuation at best). Now I'm tempted to continue writing in that vein, but alas, while I occasionally get my Faulkner on, I don't think I could do it (nor do I think it'd fit) for this story. We'll see, I suppose.
It's beautiful out today. Yesterday was, too. I went for a walk at lunch and may do so again today. I guess we're getting some of the summer we didn't get last year? Or an early preview of this year's? I will take as much summer as I can get, personally.
*turns face towards the sun and sighs blissfully*
Today's poem:
Black Dress
I could go no further than that first line:
Spring comes even to the closet.
The words like little iron blossoms on a vine.
The parks full of people under a heathery sky.
The music of silverware, of violins.
Near the road, a woman paints
the pickets of her fence with blinding light.
When Herod sat down at the dinner table, the roasted
bird flew from the platter crying, "Christ lives! He is alive!"
It's spring, even at night.
The mushrooms damply reflect the stars.
All manner of pale flesh, opened up like eyes. Moonlight
on the jellyfish. In the dark
grass the startling muteness of a child's
white rubber rat.
But the closet. Even
in spring, the closet's a blind hive. A black dress
hangs at its center - like Persephone, it's
the closet's prisoner,
and its queen. Never forget,
it sings. I saw you then. I saw it all:
After the funeral, the riotous dance. After the wedding, the long
weeping and kneeling in the bathroom stall.
Oh, there are birds the world's
entirely forgotten (winter, amnesia) singing again
to the comings and the goings, the bright
and empty flashes,
the openings and closings. Sweetheart,
I'm leaving. Honey, I'm home. But that
black dress hangs always and omniscient in its single thought, its
accumulating mass - a darkness
tucked into another darkness:
where I wore it first,
where I'll wear it last.
~Laura Kasischke
from Gardening in the Dark
***
This entry at DW:
http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/152845.html.
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