A Grey Day
A Grey Day
In the morning, the light comes in silence. The earliest light. This is my time…The house sleeps. The air overhead, glittering infinite, the moist earth beneath- one can almost taste the earth, its richness, its density. I bathe in the air like a stream. The sky is pale above the trees, pure and more mysterious than ever… a sky to dizzy, to end the astronomer’s night. In it, dim as coins on a beach, fading, shine two last stars…or are they only satellites?
It is a grey day, a day for me. I watch the rooks hang in the air, wheeling left and right then disappearing out of sight. The dark skies hold down my feelings, keep me from flying off into the stratosphere. I accept the promise of rain in the vast and unmoving sky. The geese fly overhead in their long, shifting V’s- like punctuation on the parchment page. They seem to approach slowly, accelerate, and then pass overhead like arrows….honking their flock-mates on to parts unknown.
I marvel at what a foolish and muddled heart I possess. And there is a break in the vast grey, and some light pours down… God’s idleness. He watches me, and there are moments when I reveal everything. Then I take my bricks and mortar, pen and paper, and seal myself back up. I am subtle, penetrating and sometimes mischievous, strongly inclined to love and not overdelicate in the ways that must be taken. Why do people want to be in the aura surrounding me? Why do they want to see me smile, to have me exercise that deep, imputed tendency to love? …when the exercise only pulls me from my cloistered haven, making me feel naked and reckless. I promise myself as long as the sky stays grey, I will not fly off into the atmosphere…I will not be lost forever. Consciously, or unconsciously, we are all completely selfish, and as long as we get what we want, we believe everything is alright…but is getting what we want happiness? Never getting what you want, that is unhappiness…but as long as there’s a chance of getting it..
My eyes cannot fix on things; they slip off them like dying flies. I am staggering, swaying between times when I have no strength at all, no reason, no urge to struggle…I feel as if I could only run to death like a fanatic, a believer, delirious, dazed, on those quickened feet that run to love.
Life divides itself with scars like rings contained within a tree. How close together the early ones seem, time compacts them…but time does not truly dull the pain. The noble tree stands erect, defying nature and gravity, saving its reserves for the drought, which will inevitably add more scars. It cannot move, or relieve itself of its destiny; it can only grow and bear the brunt that nature will give. In fall, leaves come down like rain, like a sacrifice…the prodigious arbors give them up freely. In the turning of seasons there will be buds, full of promise, then leaves verdant green again. The trees would again, in addition to their beauty, to the roof they made beneath the sky, to their whispering, their slow inarticulate sounds, the riches they poured down, they would besides all this, give scale to everything, a true scale, reassuring, wise. We do not live as long; we do not know as much….we will never know.
Oh how their limbs must tire…All this makes me limb-weary and ready for sleep.
~Charlotte 3.18.09
