As the year closes, I think of its unseemly demises. With simple time, it carried away so much. Memories, people. I'll never forget that peculiar feeling I had walking along the train tracks in Tartu on the day it was over. Abielu katki. It was high May, California weather, sun that lingered, warmth sumptuous and succulent and erotic, the trees like Dr. Seuss would have sketched and colored them, except greener and more pungent, luscious and octopus, enveloping you up in like her red-gold locks. As I eased into single-hood, the temptation to be a bastard ever strong, I clung to ideas of her natural boughs because of what they represented to me -- the last vestiges of the soul, the last morsels of the self. Now the year ends and I am not even halfway toward her, not even a quarter of the way there, or a sixteenth. "You need more time, you need more time." Watch me scratch the rocky bottom of the tunnel, trying to move toward something that I'm convinced must be light. Sometimes. More time, it all takes time ... The ghost of one love gone, and another arrives to take her place. Vulnerability. Deep as death. Not nearly enough time, she tells me. This is how it goes and goes. It's not exactly easy, all this. But what other choice do I really have? If you see light, you must move toward it, correct? Candle light flickers over dinners and there it is again, a well-contained thrill. Someday, someday. The one, the one.
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We wish you Happy New Year too :)
Soovime Sulle rahu, rõõmu, õnne. Good to see you back blogging on your familiar turf.
Lovely text, I like your cadences!
Btw, here a great poem by Wallace Stevens about the subject:
Farewell to Florida
I
Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,
The snake has left its skin upon the floor.
Key West sank downward under massive clouds
And silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon
Is at the mast-head and the past is dead.
Her mind will never speak to me again.
I am free. High above the mast the moon
Rides clear of her mind and the waves make a refrain
Of this: that the snake has shed its skin upon
The floor. Go on through the darkness. The waves fly back
II
Her mind had bound me round. The palms were hot
As if I lived in ashen ground, as if
The leaves in which the wind kept up its sound
From my North of cold whistled in a sepulchral South,
Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea,
Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys,
Her days, her oceanic nights, calling
For music, for whisperings from the reefs.
How content I shall be in the North to which I sail
And to feel sure and to forget the bleaching sand ...
III
I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools
Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness
Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms
Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,
The trees likes bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.
To stand here on the deck in the dark and say
Farewell and to know that that land is forever gone
And that she will not follow in any word
Or look, nor ever again in thought, except
That I loved her once ... Farewell. Go on, high ship.
IV
My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.
The men are moving as the water moves,
This darkened water cloven by sullen swells
Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,
The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.
To be free again, to return to the violent mind
That is their mind, these men, and that will bind
Me round, carry me, misty deck, carry me
To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on.
Wallace Stevens
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