Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Another Eve--- Another Eve My Love

Three years ago I sat staring at a similar screen to this one before me tonight.  I was reeling a bit from a conversation I had had with my parents in the previous week.  While talking to them I followed a common arc of my nature and described in somewhat ecstatic and slightly odd language the glowing quality of the world around me.  At one point I melded two simultaneous themes of my Winter: the long tail in the production of Plastic and the nearly catastrophic, yet abundant offers of the generative world which seems itself, judge and jury, to conclude that we're living in a party.  With plastic hats?  I shouldn't congratulate myself that I didn't mention the plastic hats.  For, my soliloquy went on a bit long and fairly strange even for a Shakespeare, whom I am clearly not.  I was staring at an arbor with my cellphone at my ear and staring at the underside of a woody vine sprouting the beginning of what I would hopefully tend as I had for a few years.  Originally, years past, I had been paid to trim the thing.  From that day I stared up, standing beneath, but wanting exactly what I had: understanding.  My posture and bearing and place in the world were generative.  Generative of my children; generative of Love; generative of the circumstances that proscribe the dreamworld of my imagination.  At least seven full books on plastics and their organic origins, their peculiar structures so reliant on surface tension (only the second time in my life I encountered, reading of the surface tension in polymeric phenomena, a child-like wonder about surface tension.  The previous time was as a true child encountering the surface of water in a cylinder.  Took me years to realize the forces implicit in what touches.  If I had a Geni.....  if only, I could touch the lamp!)

That morning, speaking what was three years and a week or so ago, I simply celebrated the blessing of my parents riotous intelligence and curiosity.  At one point, none-the-less, one of them was forced to admit aloud that it might be a case where I would not stop talking. I smiled at this.  I'd been accused, like many young men, of a great deal worse.  Besides! What had brought my torrent, my Johnsonville Flood to the earpiece in their ear was something more than nonsense.  Something from the book filled shelves that are my preferred domain.  Not a shelter from the world as it is, but, a formally quiet place that burrows to any location in the known Universe.  Probative... protected... primary to the philosophy that remains placental to our perspectives.  Not dinner table conversation.  Staring at the sprouting wooden vine I had so many times clipped for the elderly friend I now lived with... I realized I'd become reliant on the generosity of my favorite people on Earth, so I might sprout with the probative torrent that remains a secret gift from the small town library.  In the shame of losing it I smiled.  In what Temple can I share the generative?

And so it was---- three years ago this evening I was thinking about that.  Thinking and waiting for a subject to rise to my heart, not so much my brain.  I stared at the screen and fingered with the cursor on the screen the timestamp that sits at the top right hand corner.  To finger the face of a temporal idol seemed appropriate to the spaces in my soul just then.  Not entirely intentionally I clicked upon the time face that read 10:34 PM.  Clicked, as always, and now: tonight.  Click right now that face that says 9:27 PM and read a menu below, headed: "Tuesday, March 20, 2012" as well as a few other administrative concerns.  Three years ago, seeing that date, wow!  It's the Eve of Spring.  It's the Eve of Spring!!!  Is this my favorite evening in the year?  Spring is without doubt my favorite season.  Like the drive you took to your lovers home.  Regardless of what happens in the end.  The pavement that accepts the burden of your modern, metal steed is a view to a set of difficult questions and unspoken hopes until the day that it's a path you will never take again... or the day when it becomes your direction home.  Methinks the two might sing in different keys.  The Eve of Spring is the end indeed to the Gardens of Space... the unicellular, striving communities we used to be.  Flowers for the cemetery that holds those creatures who lived toward the gift we hold in our lungs and sigh: respiration.  The winter winks of beauties like these.  A conceit that explains how the grass might indeed be blessed by God.  Waves of grain indeed.  But, only beyond the Eve of Spring.

And so it is---- tonight I smile back to that night three years ago this evening.  That Spring brought me, indeed, my garden again.  My beloved work.  Some wonderful friends.  Some slow Mid-Western travels of dense humidity and firefly beauty.

The day... when the wincing, waiting of a woman ends as she smiles at and with her man.

Two hours of Winter and one minute remain, my friend.