Lift + Thrust

Half-formed possibilities drift above me, nebulous, light,
Clouds across a slow-moving sky, vague, moody, protean,
Like interrupted dreams, ephemeral,
They fade before my concentrated gaze —

And then, below, spread dense and wide,
The ground on which I tread,
A firmament of mass and past,
Of oh, so many deeds done, half-done, undone,
Left behind, or simply dead and gone.
All the life I’ve lived till now.

Steadily I rise, but does the lightness overhead
Draw me upward?
Or am I lifted up from below?

Change, for Better or for Worse

I once had a cat who was deathly ill. Not for long, of course.

Really, he was my wife’s cat, a cat that she’d had when she was a teenager, some 6 or 7 years earlier. Now we were newly married, and one day she got a call from home, her mom telling her the cat was doing poorly and she was thinking of having him put down. My wife thought that she just might be able to save the cat, or at least that she’d rather blame herself for the cat’s death than blame her mom, and that prompted a quick drive to Mom’s house and the introduction of a very old and boney Siamese cat to our small household.

We already had a younger cat — maybe two, I’m not quite sure — but this new addition did little to disrupt the local feline social structure. Mostly, he slept. Occasionally he would move. He would also eat a little, poop a little, make a God-awful vocalization now and then — something like Eartha Kitt, but angry and with a bad sore throat — and every few hours, we’d give him a subcutaneous infusion of fluids (sort of like an I.V. drip, but it doesn’t go directly into a vein) since he wasn’t drinking any water and tended to be dehydrated. My wife worked for a veterinarian, and got the sub-Q equipment there.

So anyway, here lay this old cat at death’s door for weeks and weeks, even months. Much longer than you’d think anyone could linger at that particular threshold. Day after day, the same routine: Sleep. Eat. Sleep. Poop. Sleep. Fluids. Sleep.

Then one afternoon I notice he was up, exploring around the apartment. He seemed curious; at the very least, he was looking for a new place to sit or lie down.

I was so happy! Here was improvement at last. He wasn’t lying just lying around anymore. He was becoming more active. He must be feeling a lot better. What a wonderful, encouraging development!

Within a day or two, of course, the cat died.

I had seen his change in behavior as a sign of improvement, while a more fact-based view might have seen the change as nothing more than that: a change, period. He had lingered long, just this side of death; now something prompted him to change his behavior, and it should have come as no great surprise that this change might very well give him just the teensiest extra bit of a shove that was needed for him to cross over.

“Fascinating,” you might say. Perhaps with just the hint of irony in your voice. But what exactly is the point of this story about a cat’s journey into death? Well, I’ll tell you.

The main thing is that it’s good to be aware of one’s own natural tendency to put a positive or negative emotional spin onto any change in circumstance that may occur. You can see something as a change for the better or a change for the worse, but on the most basic level it really is simply a change, nothing more and nothing less.

If your general disposition is to see just about any change as an opportunity for improvement, you’re pretty much on the right track in seeing changes in a positive light. Likewise if you’re generally disposed to see change as a bad thing. That’s pretty natural. The big mistake comes when you unconsciously assume that your own personal and selfish preferences happen to run in parallel with the inevitable, natural course of history. The fact is, a coin is just as likely to come down “tails,” even when your own personal preference is for “heads.”

So, accept change. Embrace it. And watch it, to see where it leads. You may find yourself celebrating new possibilities, and that’s wonderful. It’s a lot of what encourages us to keep on trying. But don’t be too surprised if, in the end, those rosy possibilities don’t turn out to be “certainties,” after all.  

Substrata

How like a ragged, worn and weathered tombstone,
The standing chimneys are of burned-out houses.
And how like ancient, papery skin,
The faded, brittle billets-doux of past romance;
The lines of praise, of love eternal,
And written in a heart-felt hand.
O, who’d have thought those inky lines
Would so outlast their fevered sentiment.

How like a severed limb, or entrails, drawn,
Spread out and splayed for public show,
The memory is of lost, past love,
Irrecoverably gone.
Yet still its echoes, phantom pain and phantom pleasures,
Repeat in benthic murmurs deep within the soul.

How like a palimpsest, the tissues of my heart:
Writ fresh today with new love’s tale’s enchantment,
With vast potential, possibility, adventures for imagining;
And still, barely below, beneath the thinnest of veneers,
Lie other tales, vestigial as textures etched,
Crazed and crackling webs,
Unforgotten wounds and scars and healing.

Low Light

Standing quiet on a dark, grassy hillside,
stars and clouds above,
scattered oaks and scattered cattle my only company.

I run my fingers over the camera’s controls,
guessing blindly at focus, aperture, shutter speed, framing.

Lock down the tripod head.
Lock up the viewfinder’s mirror.
Allow the camera to rest, settle, still.
Now take into my fingers’ grip the cable release, and… press.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight, and SNAP, the shutter closes.

The 20 or so seconds of processing time between exposure and display
seem an eternity to my impatient mind, but are nothing
compared to the 2 weeks I would wait as a teenager
for the drug store to deliver my prints. Nowadays
I can see my results, re-adjust the camera,
and make a second or third attempt,
all within a matter of minutes. 

Perfection is still far beyond me, but its nearer approach
seems now more swift, and my imagination

more in tune with my abilities and those of my camera.
Yet, still.
Instant gratification simply takes too long.
And more desire leads to more suffering. 

Now, there’s a business plan for you.

And despite my imaginings and my camera’s attempts
to capture a frozen moment forever still,
still the stars and planets continue on their charted paths,
oak boughs sway in the light breeze,
and cattle low and shift in the low,
low light of this midnight meadow.

4/26/2016

Destiny Optional

One thing about conventional wisdom: It never tells you anything that's in any way surprising, unless you're walking around with your head in the sand, which isn't even a very sensible metaphor anyhow.
But life is full or surprises, sort of a years-long sequence of themes and variations, with the same people over and over again, but doing things that you'd never have expected them to do, but that they may have dreamed of doing for as long as you've known them. Or thought you did.

I am thinking now of one of those crossroads that somehow makes itself apparent just when you think you're on the only, steady, straight-ahead highway to the horizon. Hurtling along on smooth-polished rails, you think, with a close group of companions on mostly-parallel paths. But then you take your eye off the horizon for a moment, and when you look back up the train is a shambles, still, missing wheels and rails and any sense of direction, current or former. It's as if a glamour has been withdrawn, and you see the carriage clearly: dusty, half on its side, windows broken out, scant shreds of upholstery hanging from the skeletons of old seats.

And no one else seems to be there. Nor any sign of them--where they were, where they went, what went on during that moment of lapse that seems now to have been something close to an eternity.

Imagine Tutankhamen, seeing all the goings-on in his tomb, a thousands-of-years instant after having been sealed up, his slaves close to hand, his brains packed neatly in a jar nearby, and now a sudden shaft of dust-moted light stabs through his peaceful, long-uninterrupted rest. Then noises, strange languages, and so many eyes and hands, some curious, some greedy, some flat-out amazed at the wealth and bounty that will not, clearly, accompany young T to any next kingdom, but will instead be divided among scientists, collectors, museums, thieves, only to be brought back together, at least in part, every now and then, to be toured around the great cities of the world, cities far beyond the like of Thebes or even Alexandria, where gasping mourners will walk down endless, corded, funerary lanes for just a brief glimpse of his own remains, wrapped in ancient linen, and beside him the stock and treasures that had been his silent companions for so many dark millennia.

Now, that's a derailment.