Driving

In the late winter evening she passes familiar landmarks.  The traffic is thick but moving. The stores are clotted with people.  The flashes of eye-catching signs making for distraction. It is dusk now, she is moving into the country… Headed home on the long curving stretches, lost in thought, egged on by the music on the radio.  By the time she crossed the river the trees were black silhouetted by the deep blue of twilight. She flew along, in the left lane only, above the limit, tired and wistful , filled with plans. Her eyes stung with tears held back.  On the seat behind her were bags of groceries, on the floor were gas slips, parking tickets stub, dog leashes and water bowls, mail that had never been opened, bills. Every scrap of paper filled with near illegible ramblings of her prolific muddled mind.  Penned at stoplights, in carpool, and even braced on the steering wheel while headed down the highway. All left on the floorboards to be trampled underfoot. Maybe the trampling of her thoughts serves her right.  

The road runs along the throat of the mountains, for most of the way there is no house visible, not a store, nothing except the long galaxy of distant houses on the hillside beginning to shine in the dark.  She turns from the main road onto a side street. She sees houses she knows intimately without any idea who lives in them. She sees parked cars she recognizes, a wooden fence with the same rail missing, the same two dogs tied and looking lonely in the same backyard.  She is nearing home, but she doesn’t want to go, she wants to keep driving. Driving till the street lights run out, till there is nothing but country. She wants to find a pasture somewhere and lie down in the dark to scream at the stars. She wants to accuse the satellites of mimicry.  She wants to feel cold ground on her back; she wants to feel something, anything but this. She wants to breathe, she wants space unlimited. If she let go of the wheel, the car would surely take her there. She rakes her fingers through her long hair in a frustrated moment. She rubs her nose, and then wipes her eyes angrily.  The tears flow now, and she hates the tears. She wonders if she could go to the barn this late, would they detect her? Huddled in a stall somewhere, her face buried in a sympathetic mane. She craves the smell of soothing horses and calm, quiet munching; the occasional shift of weight, swish of tail, anything to soothe her. She would stay there all night if she could… Hiding like a naughty child.

But here is her turn, and she dutifully puts on her blinker.  She regrettably makes the turn for home. She steadies herself for the onslaught…whether intended or not, it will be waiting for her…it always is. 

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