Thursday, August 07, 2014

Dragging the Map-Lines

A life gets slowly out of tune, imperceptibly, till the sound of your body -- you suddenly realize -- is a distressing discord: you are lost, because you've been tuning all the lesser strings to this one: every reference is tainted, as if your ship had been dragging the map-lines behind it. What to steer by?

This is not some haught philosophical proposition: this concerns a sink full of dirty dishes and a crisper drawer of broccoli with an assortment of little flowerheads winking to yellow -- a pointillist painter changing his mind -- and the drift of treats into necessities. (I will die if I do not have a blackberry milkshake. Really?)

And so -- a half-waking, a lift of my shaggy head, a puzzled shrug. I put my long orangutan arms up to the branches and pull myself higher in the tree. What one wants, at such a time, is a vantage point, and a breath of cooler air to clear one's head.

Out of tune I may be -- I am -- but the muscles ripple under my fur: I am hugely, hugely powerful. There is time, still. There is time.

1 comment:

Lucy said...

...and the drift of treats into necessities'

I know about that, and about so much else here, and yet more that I didn't but am glad to now. And I very badly needed to be told there is time, still; I'd begun to wonder.

Thank you again Dale, please don't stop writing here.