The forest is an empress, temptress, russet velvet and svelte as it dresses in the furs of snow and lures the orbs of my eyes to be seduced by its beauty. Wooly fog entombing the land, I emerge from the beige palette of an upholstered vehicle into its purity, with my Turkish rucksack wrestled from the backseat, and my camera, the noose of my neck, reverend and rhythmic. Gingerly, I dig my soft shoes into the polar swell of land, hiking the perilous slope to its crescendo and the plateau. Look.
It’s as if I existed only in a freeze frame of a film, faded to white, and nothingness is everything. Is this what God looks like? The murmurs of nature in wintry extinction, hibernation, there is no evidence of life, omitting the ebb and flow of my blood lungs, and I wonder, I wonder, how many breaths old am I ... Photos by the wonderful Aëla Labbé, sweet, as always, to send me these!
Dreaming in midnight blues, I am constellations drawn in the sand of desolate seas under the swollen bloom of the sun at morning, the microscope of the moon, in the night. I am its specimen, the cranium in exhibit behind the milky skull, a wunderkammer, swallowed melodies, pastel tints of memory ...Photo by Michal Beer.
The awakening. Bear and claw from slumber, under your cocoon of quilts, tawny and yawning, and into the sheep’s wool of fog. Poppy seeds of light sewn to the breast of daybreak, brambly brush bristles of forest combing the bridal veil of aurora, flushed rosy with frost.
Mt. Washington in flames. Puff. Puff. Puff. “You shouldn’t smoke,” I tell the tavern, “Not with timber lungs.” It slumps skinny-kneed, coughs up a confetti of embers black humored, celebrating.
I-83 South, tattooing the whites of my eyes with flecks of tiger gold, the sun gloved in thickly-netted forests, for a breath or seven, Hail Mary. House of prisms, embraced by the sun, lost friend, its warm lips press kisses to the wooly napes of our necks, the folds of our elbows. We peer to telescoping porches, pinned to row homes; bumbling ghosts untie their shoes on the staircases.
The stars hang you by your ankles, as Ólafur plays something on violin, something that sounds akin to a spoonful of nostalgia swallowed warm. Wisdom teeth tied to strings, toted like little forlorn dogs on cotton braids, tugging at their collars. “Oh, well. Four less teeth to floss.” (And I do detest flossing, my friend.)
Autumn is for seamstresses. Wispy clouds cross stitch the heavens, looms of birch trees delicately weave oriental rugs and carpets of saffron and scarlet, to soften the contours of cars soldiering on curbsides beneath. The knitted prairies, browned.
I am seven thousand three hundred and eighty nine sunrises, drunk on stardust, hallucinations swimming in the tow of tidal pools, blood moon, sanguine. We lunch on sunlight, misty daybreaks blue. Bushes gossip softly in a gust of wind, as we trudge up Hickory Avenue, where we orient ourselves by the salmon colored house, abandoned and stuffed with disembodied and lost dreams.
There’s a terrarium of flowers growing from your throat, pluck a few and make a bouquet for the kitchen table, your beside. A sight to behold, amidst the plethora of thumbed-through books, and frothy cups of half-drunken chocolate milk.
Dawn and dusk, the heartbeats, the ebbing breath of earth, comfort for the richest of souls. Pocketbooks are for petty hands. Hold my hand in yours, cathedrals of stories to warm the wicks of fingertips.
P.S. I’ve figuratively penciled in another post for Christmastime, my favorite holiday. Speaking of Christmas, I’ve begun a series of gift idea lists on Pinterest.
All photographs in this entry are by the marvelous Aëla Labbé, who was so wonderful to give me permission to post these and send them to me in the size I fancied. I am in the love with the bohemian beauty of her photographs, and the spirit that illuminates from them. This way to her Flickr photostream or buy some prints from her Etsy shop.Title Quote: Ovid
Photo Credits: Aëla Labbé
Into the fluorescent-lit night, my blood elopes with hospital vials, needles nipping in the crooks of my elbows, sucker punches of bruises, putrid-yellow. Pain’s caged animal gnaws at my skull, thumps. I’ve lost the key to let it out. “I’d cut a door for you, if I could!” I cry.
Numbness. Bricked-up land, at which hours crookedly coil and gallop. Something sinister seethes in the trio of clock hands, and swaddled in chasms of a labyrinth, sleep is yanked from your eyelids, alabaster.
I walk from the hospital’s yawning lobby, gulping swallows of autumn, tufts of wafer-thin gauze ghosting at warm flesh once furrowed with IV lines. Summer had departed, a third story suicide in the northern hemisphere’s celestial asylum.
Once home, slow cooked crock-pot feasts; from great aunts, a cocoon of quilts and crocheted afghans, sleeping beneath the autumnal empyrean. Primary colors, orchards, soft-edged squares, pushing at the phantoms of memory.
Roaming misty lands, I wept the tears of the sun, cupping a swan glazed mug of tea, satin for tongues. Wrinkles of rain braiding rivulets on collarbones; in a bathrobe, a book of poems, hemmed in-between my ribcage and elbow.
Behold the tender wolves in the wood thrush, and jaws agape at the apostle’s trust. Nay, not the primrose road, but through the thorny bush.
Oh, blessed, blessed one. It is struggle that spoon-feeds strength. If you are never thrown to the depths, how dull the magnificence of a mountain crest. May the crowns of our heads be anointed with hardships, and with the purest of joys. Our bodies will be poor, but oh, how rich our souls!
Struggle is the sculptor, if you coddle yourself from the bite of its chisels, you will never be sculpted into the magnum opus you could of been, and what true tales of triumph will you tell at the banquet table?
We’ve been breathing by ventilators society intubated in us. Awake from the coma of a carbon clone, of cursory. Breathe, enlightenment.
By the skin of our teeth, we’ll be alright.
P.S. I am founding an invitation only writers' society. The project is only in its chrysalises stage, although you can read a rough summary of its premise here, and I hope for it to be a full fledged being, by Christmas.
P.P.S. Another thing, unrelated to the first: I suspect my entries can be a bit redundant. It’s just that my foundations sometimes suffer earthquakes, and in my humanity, I need to be reminded of these things again and again. And so, I write about them.
Title Quote: Oscar Wilde
Photo & Art Credits: (1, 2, 6) Natalie Kucken, (3, 8) Misma Andrews, (4) Parker Fitzgerald, (5) Nishe, (7) Gabriella Barouch, (9) Matias Santa Maria, (10, 11) Alison Scarpulla.
