Monday, April 16, 2012

Rochester's Slippers

Brilliant clouds: my eyes are dazzled. I lower them from the window, and inverse shapes still hover, moving erratically across the screen, pulled here and there by the focus point of my gaze.

I am at a brink, certainly: the long sandy crest of a dune, where the wind laps at my feet.

Some things twinge and some don't. Tulips of extraordinary beauty in my office. They opened over the weekend. I think of making something: but I'm so tired, and there's a constant babble all around me. All I want is the stabilization of touch. I forget everything else: some things I forget on purpose, and others by accident, but I forget pretty much everything. A few frozen pictures, that's all.

There is a lingering anger at being so obviously and deliberately misunderstood. But after all, why shouldn't I be misunderstood? In what spiritual bill was it written down, this inalienable right to be understood? It takes time to understand, and everyone is short on time. I am too. And the payoff to understanding me, when I am so confused and contradictory, is pretty small. Let it go. Let the wind blow the sand in snake patterns, sidewinding over the beach; let it ruffle the hair on my head.

6 comments:

Kathleen said...

Connecting! With the beauty of clouds and tulips. (My gray day has turned blue, with gray-edged white clouds.) And the lingering anger of being misunderstood.

We are human. That's why.

Zhoen said...

I don't mind not being understood. I mind people lying about understanding me, when they clearly don't.

marly youmans said...

Yes, that's a human feeling--perhaps common in a busy world, though rarely teased-out and examined. That image of you on the brink reminded me of Caspar David Friedrich.

I'm not caught up with you, so I probably don't understand--shall take a peek after I get back from Roanoke. Still trying to overcome The Bug.

Zhoen, is it lying if they truly don't understand? An interesting thing to say! And how could they ever understand if they think they understand too soon...

Dale said...

Kathleen, yes, it's just this business of being human :-)

I hear you, Zhoen.

Nothing topical, Marly! Old, unhappy, far-off things, drawn back to mind by a series of coincidences.

Caspar David Friedrich! Too true. I really, you know, am an early German Romantic: the 20th and 21st Centuries haven't left much impress.

marly said...

I, too, am drawn into the past.

carolee said...

xo

your posts & poems are always so tender. don't ever stop writing them.