The Returns

But after all 
There are such things  
And these are the things 
Who'll turn your memories back into dreams again.

Oh, it's all flying and waving 
For you to keep trying.

You're so close. So close. 

All the returns 

One of these days, 
One of these days, 
One of these days, 

One of these days.                            -- Rickie Lee Jones 

Driving through the night, the new moon invites the shyest stars into the sky and all the memories come in broken English, briefly, like the lights of distant farm houses, here now before sinking back beneath the hill.  Approaching cars are rarities.  They tease the darkness.  They promise something. As if they were messengers that have lost their way, they cannot deliver.  The pole star has hidden itself behind the vaporous cape of a passing cloud.  

Every day, the sun sets 7 billion times, sets and rises in relationship to eyes opened and closed, drunk and sober, through windows and walls while wading into lakes and diving into oceans or sinking into the Sahara where the ball of fire turns the sands into a heart made of amber glass, still beating.  What is seen and unseen?  What is felt in the bones?   Each soul situated discretely on the globe anticipates the day ending, the encroaching shadow; each soul anticipates the return--some nervously, some happily, some passively absorbed with sleep and dreams--of light to the sky.

I pass through the night like a series of veils.  There are times when I laugh aloud, times when actual tears begin to congregate in the corners of my eyes.  The past looks on, staring, like a disapproving cat.  He is made of regret, and regret is only the residual stain of shame.  But he is grinning, purring even.  He is pacing in the cage of this flesh.  He would devour me if he were outside.  On principal, he would rip me limb for limb and leave my carcass for the hyenas to find.

I have been home.  I return home.  I pass through a third home on my way, and I am disoriented by my own sentimentality.  Memories haunt the highway like hitchhikers.  They taunt me to stop but its impossible (I have promises to keep, and miles to go).  If only, if only...  This is how nostalgia feels in the body, both airy and grave, like ghosts haunting the heart,  its empty rooms.  I am waiting here, in this atrium with its painted ceiling.

Time on Steroids

This acceleration--yourself watching yourself vaulting forward through decades, the permeable plasma of time--can be disorienting. The g force pulls.  It disfigures the clarity of your handsome face.  If it lasts...

A minute longer and you will faint, forgetting weeks and months and seasons.  You will wake up stumbling in a smeared hallway, recklessly hurling down  a highway paved with adrenaline where you careen.  But, keep breathing.  Check your pulse.  Check your baggage.  Take what you can...

With you, I feel what I would like to call calm but at this speed, this feeling (this love?) is more like stability than peace.  You steady me.  You hold together this aging spaceship, this rusting Toronado, this eroding body.  Growing old...

I am getting wiser.  I am retreating from my fears.  Vanquished, they lay where I left them.  The frontiers of me are torn and bloody, but those battles are done.  And I imagine futures that find miracles, and futures that find peace...

Death-bed conversions and catholic perversions, past aspersions by those begrudged against both my values and my character.  The unnecessary dramas of a fragmented dream depart from me--scraps of paper in the wind--the longer I am awake... 

I remember many things:  gravity and weightlessness.   One reminds the other.  Each assures the other of its validity.  And what are we but in between;  we are formlessness enclosed in form, the immaterial soul constrained by body, flesh and blood and water...

Time is fluid, at any speed.  Its just that evaporation occurs.  Velocity is, of course, a kind of heat...

The Present

Time--not as measured but as experienced--is repetitive disorientation, a constant dissolution of expectation and continual adaptation to emerging "facts".  That is to say that time, as the necessary fulcrum for change, must at its core be off balance and capricious.  No matter how successful one's distractions or how apathetic one is to the concepts of ambition or progress, time will always be the precarious, unraveling rope bridge spanning the plumetting gorge.  

Time is the tension of the water droplet as it shivers in taut suspense.  It hangs there, suspended, on the underside of the shelf, a glossy ceiling painted a comforting pea-coat blue.  It is almost invisible as it materializes, slowly, as if this were the blooming of a flower or the delicate construction of a tiny, tiny house.  

And the world stands still.  

This is not ice.  This is a diamond, a differently constructed planet, with sharpened angles and the power to refract light.  The crystals are like the prisms trapped in eyes.  They see backward through the imperfect art of memory, and forward through the arrogance of augury.  The only clear image, cut to dazzling precision is the vision that is now, a vision unfoundered by the doubt learned from your last week, last month, last year, last lifetime and unburdened by some impossible idea of an untenable future.