the small rain down can rain
I realized today, as I struggled to class through the drizzle and wind, that I’m experiencing an abrupt discovery (rediscovery?) of my collarbone- though regrettably this mounting awareness of a part of my body I’d never noticed before seems to have necessitated its redefinition as the locus of all the intense suffering inherent in Montreal weather.
I refuse to wear a scarf, because its april, really(!) and possibly I believe the resultant martyrdom of my collarbone might just goad my adopted city into more seasonally appropriate climatic conditions. A year ago I would have (and did) quoted april is the cruelest month with all the enthusiasm of one who had not yet realized that almost all her favorite things were hopelessly clichéd. But I went out to buy a hyacinth the other day, to invite at least some hapless remnant of spring into my daily surroundings. Instead of the expected groupings of pungently scented flowers in the sparkling hues of Easter, the salesman gamely led me over to a tray of crumpled dirt, with stubbly disconsolate bits of green stem poking out through the soil. When I asked, foolishly, if there might be some hyacinths in bloom, he actually laughed at me. So, to me, these lines seem appropriate:
’You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
-- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.*
I guess maybe my primary accomplishment in the past 12 months is to have moved 35 lines further along in my Wasteland referencing. Woot.
* = Waste and empty is the sea, translation courtesy of T.S. Eliot Hypertext Project
I refuse to wear a scarf, because its april, really(!) and possibly I believe the resultant martyrdom of my collarbone might just goad my adopted city into more seasonally appropriate climatic conditions. A year ago I would have (and did) quoted april is the cruelest month with all the enthusiasm of one who had not yet realized that almost all her favorite things were hopelessly clichéd. But I went out to buy a hyacinth the other day, to invite at least some hapless remnant of spring into my daily surroundings. Instead of the expected groupings of pungently scented flowers in the sparkling hues of Easter, the salesman gamely led me over to a tray of crumpled dirt, with stubbly disconsolate bits of green stem poking out through the soil. When I asked, foolishly, if there might be some hyacinths in bloom, he actually laughed at me. So, to me, these lines seem appropriate:
’You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
-- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.*
I guess maybe my primary accomplishment in the past 12 months is to have moved 35 lines further along in my Wasteland referencing. Woot.
* = Waste and empty is the sea, translation courtesy of T.S. Eliot Hypertext Project