tidal

The air is green grey, heavy and chill, the stones jade, rose, deep purple-grey; here and there, a lighter, warmer yellow-brown.  Water rolls up and over, slides up and over, over and over in layers, over-lapping itself, unfurling.  It has tongues and veins of white foam that reveals bubbles as it pulls out and away again from freshly wetted stones that catch a soft light.  The air smells green-grey and is cold and damp as the water continues rolling and mixing itself and then falling back. It tosses itself and crawls and scrambles over itself.  The sound is constant, it acts like the water acts, pushing itself between and around and over. It fills up the spaces and then coming back again to replace itself.

I can't decide if I am the stones or the water.  Am I being washed, rinsed...eroded? I pour myself over the stop-motion beach and my tongues make a song as surfaces slide over and against.  Where land and water meet there is an inhale and foam is born and dissipates with  an exhale.

Pixies

Glinting in the sunlight, they swim in phantom currents and ride ghost waves. Swallowed by the empty air; cephalopods,  stars or amoebas or snowflakes, they are noiseless. little globes. handfuls of sand caught in a whirlpool. Their ambience and ambivalence to me reminds me how the things of the world continue...orbiting, riding the swell of some breath or wind, colliding, gently moving apart; undulating with the flux and stir of gravities and anti-gravities. If my doings were spread wide enough to float, would I appear so graceful and irreverent? It makes me wonder about lines of reason.  Is reasonable intent a straight trajectory?  Is straightness a myth?

When i am resting wide and open, intending nothing, maybe then, I am like a dust mote.

Fire Whorl

Green wood with fissures of black and a quiet creaking, as with glass or ice in frightful cold.  Dark clouds roll overhead. There is a quickening; a fluttering spin of light. It twists relentlessly around itself and then loses it’s grip momentarily.  It flirts, teases and licks, touches and grabs and pulls away.  It sings in high whistles, adding it’s own pitch to those of the black crickets whose disembodied voices choir the heat.  It’s hue moves from muted oranges into peals of yellow with veins of indigo.  The heart of it throbs steadily.

This is the mirror of moods, grabbing, tugging, spinning frantically and then dying back, the shades of the blood under skin at a word, at a touch, at a taste, at a thought.  I am the whipping spiral of that flame, a hurricane hurried by the tempests around it, dying back into and spreading out from a heart of glowing heat.  This center hums constantly with anxiety and longing and also with the burn of hunger, and a trembling that betrays vulnerability. 

It is the invisible made visible, the way debris and dirt will reveal the funnel of a cyclone, the spiral of friction that gives shape to my bones and blood and the cells within.  It is the spiral that plays in the center of my sex.  It is the arch of Pegasus’ neck, flickering up into my naked eyes, rearing and tonging out of itself, stretched by invisible winds and then dipping back to it’s own centrifuge.  I think of the sun.

the snail

                                                                                                      undulating snail

                                                               glistening in the misty
                                   petals of the poppy
                        

                                                       her eyes feel.

Point of Decision

The sea tongues the rock once molten, now frozen mid-gallop toward the other. Birds tossed like pieces of paper in the wind. Bone, meat, feather adornments on the colliding bodies of land and water. Flinging themselves and flung. They dive and fall and scream and I envy them and imagine, standing as I am atop one of the cliffs, what it might be like to wheel fearlessly above the cold ocean and jagged land. 

I am filled with shivering inspiration and I swallow and swallow with my eyes, but can't get a breath and can't rest my desire to take in more and more. and still more.

And the clouds sit.  Like predators. 

There is a frustrated wish to toss myself immortally to the wind. My small body clings to its limits and also some vague yet pervasive sense that this landscape is already myself. I feel the span of it like skin, from the eyes of pink vapor to the fins of foam and the blades of stone that slice the sky. 

Metronome

The trembling. I feel my own trembling and fragility. About to let go and fall. I was struck initially, in my state, by the passionless suicide of each droplet. Clinging and then decidedly and precisely plunging, pulled by it's engorged and ripened weight into space. Such beautiful dispassionate simplicity lightened me and distracted me from my brooding and disquiet.

The rhythm. Its regularity like a metronome. Warm and comforting. The clean simplicity of the porcelain with heavy aged metal. Worn and polished. Neither pretentious nor shabby. I see my reflection in the metal and the reflection is there, so fleetingly, in the water before it falls. After it falls the next drop emerges without hesitation, grows full, grows heavy and drops; it's departure not an abandonment, but a small echo that reverberates and then swells.

The metal links of the stopper drape elegantly and also conjure memories of the inexpensive chains I used as a teenager to keep charms about my neck. That girl was full of uncertainty and determination, the simple chains a reminder of her sweet struggle to navigate a world of conventions and inexplicably imposed obligations. Further away, but stirring some distant rage, is the implied boundary : inaccessible sanctuary. private property. Far far below those suspended orbs, a shadow cast. I wonder what lies beyond where my eyes see.

I was initially charmed by the beauty of the faucet itself. Simple, sturdy. Dripping not because it is cheap, but because every natural and beautiful thing has leaks and cracks. Imperfections are a relief. They offer some feeling of assurance, some release from a veneer of perfectionism or control.