Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune - Paul Verlaine

We sit here in the sun; Sunday morning, dragonflies Dancing, summer is high. You say, “It will be a hot day.” I nod, and stay silent, gazing at Another yellow dandelion in The grass, another dropped Splinter of the sun.

The day grows old, so do our Cells, the loves that we hoard In them, and the salt that crusts Our shirts as we bend to dig In the garden we are growing For this brief season given To us both, on the same earth.

O! What song will be ours For the night to come? What glaze Will coat our cupped hands As we drink again and again From the fountain that stands at the center, as it leaps Into the pale moonlight?

A song, set to Debussy's 'Clair de Lune', for N & V (recently wed), for the incidental happiness they, perhaps without intending, brought to my Sunday morning.

[1] This world is shot

with desire, from the first breath, the first suck on the breast; it seems so

the more I think or don’t think.

[2] Last night sitting in a car a friend unfolded a cloth mural of grief, delicately woven with past complaints, accusations, and desires for something else, something transcendental, unseen, and thus always incomplete.

Here when a son dies in a war, they give you a folded flag to keep. So was it a flag instead, that conversation, waving at half mast for a dying marriage?

[3] A comment that was made to me: “I am surprised at your ability to stay alone for years at end.”

A response I didn’t give: “This is because my loneliness is a devious interrogator who is skilled in the use of Chinese water torture. Ever listened to the clock drip each second on your forehead? You will have to pretty much embrace me to discern the physical map of pain”

[4] Gossiping about the troubled loves of an young woman acquaintance you find yourself laughing

at her charming directness and unbridled romanticism in taking on new lovers in order to discover the one father of her unborn children,

and at your even more comical cynicism towards her saga as you recall your dog awful howls at the drowning tide after midnight, every night.

[6] I write this obscure line because like the concealed wood thrush, I too have fallen into the habit of posing a question, and a moment later providing an answer myself, repeatedly, less musically.

"What I want is a view. I want a window where I can see a tree, or even water." "Memory, Agent Starling, is what I have instead of a view." - Hannibal Lecter in 'Silence of the Lambs'

He was obsessed with a certain view. Only in this case he was looking inwards into a room with a table set under a dormer window, right in the middle of a beam of light.

There were two of them sitting there, at the table, reading, and when in their books they came upon a line of beauty, noting it down in leather bound notebooks with yellowing paper.

The smell of ink and paper, the light of afternoons turning into evenings, occasional squeak of a chair scraping against the wooden floor, the hymn of easy breathing.

He saw this as clearly as he sees himself every morning in front of the bathroom mirror shaving, i.e., he saw, and perhaps continues to see only what he wants to see.

The stray white hairs, the high dome of a balding forehead, lines around the mouth, the faint hint of a double chin, the belly that is flabby, the threads of time in other words.

Towards these a certain form willful blindness. The eye sees, and saw only the eye, his and the other’s. And eyes are usually clear chambers of light, rarely dark except in sleep or under conditions of loss.

One of them blinked. That was all it took for this loss to occur. Remember the game children play, the outstare game, where one refuses to blink even as eyes become watery graves.

And then a tsunami in minor scale. And then the disappearance of the tree in the sea. And then even the disappearance of the sea. Memory is what he has instead of a view. Memory was, actually, what he always had.