"Do You Realize" reprise, and relativism.

through north windows the blue sky echoes into the room.
Every pane wide open and the keys resound for the stranger.
the songs for a lost generation, a dreamer of dreams, a believer.
(Down the street, a hand presses to lips with a cigarette, distant eyes.)
Money? But this is breathing. This is sighing. Thinking out loud.
It's fingertips kissing through a window. Don't price that.
There's no replication, no recreation of this tonally-wrestled resolution.
What a language, rarely found.
Electricity burnishes the notes;
More clearly than eyes, speak the resonant chords.
but the system remembers the noise.

The veil of song is heavy.
How can I say such simple things like
'I care about you'
when we've lost our frames of reference for undemanding sentiment?
Who would know that's exactly what I mean and nothing more?
The frame of reference was the village.
The language of familiarity.
Unspoken rules had meaning when formed by generational experience.
Care is such a fright--
and assuring nods unsure.
Because habits of understatement
make sincere words sinister;
they call repetition pretension.

Now each person is an island
No way to know if the next Galapagos has evolved as far.
Skies are shared, but who knows what a white flag means
when everyone is their own country.

You may value what I don't, but no matter,
there's always me myself and I
(if that diamond ring turns brass,
Mama's gonna buy you a looking glass)

We fought off our limits, talked away authority but
forgot to complete the liberty for all with unlimited amnesty.
So it's safer by far to stay home
speaking the language of pretty tones.
In subjectivity is not so much freedom
but a blurry judicial safety.
--here is original ending--
--but I tried to continue--
The message passed over the ocean
that interest equals love,
that curiosity equals fantasy,
that care equals obsession.

Some take care to point out that marriage is not just romance but
work, friendship, camaraderie, battle, sacrifice.
So the same sweet things encompassed by platonic friendship
are now thought equal with romance.
God forbid the day when friends cannot be vulnerable.

Fan of gravity, don't kick the ceiling fan.

So I've really gotten into praising God for gravity. From outer space, what is up and down? If I'm standing upright, the Chinese are standing upside down... on an xyz graph, anyway! Which is how I tend to think, rather than spherically.

The gravity fan-craze started when I did something I've been needing to do this spring--walk out in a field at night and stargaze. It hasn't been enough to occasionally linger in my parked car when I get home; dirty windshield and town lights get in the way. A couple songs from Downhere's 1999 indie album encouraged me that it wasn't weird--in fact, perhaps deeply normal--to need to run out in a field and hug the earth and look at the sky and ponder the Creator's greatness. So, the first balmy night that made me aware of my aloneness, I walked into the middle of a soccer field behind my church that hadn't yet been mowed. I lay down on a tuffet of grass and stared at the sky. The breeze that danced around was both cool and warm.

As I stargazed, I played a mind game equivalent to the walking-on-the-ceiling game indoors. You know, as you lie on a bed you imagine that the ceiling is the floor; you imagine stepping over that doorway or climbing up the sloped floor/ceiling. Don't trip over the chandelier. etc. Only, in this version there's no ceiling. You've stepped through the trap door that is a skylight. Oh, that's scary.

The more I imagined I was "dangling" above outer space, the more firmly I felt the earth pressing into my shoulder blades. What I take for granted as the sensation of lying on my back felt more and more like an incredible magnet force keeping me from dropping into the sky.

P.S. I love the Orion constellation. He's a super-cool warrior dude. I don't think any of the other major constellations are people. Orion's Belt is the first collection of stars in the sky I ever learned to find and find again. Now I can see all of Orion, leaping across the night sky with his bow aimed for a long distance shot, his sword at his side. I've mentioned before how amazing it is to realize the stars I see, men of old saw too. Well, just now it occurs to me that (virtually) every soul that has ever walked this earth, has looked up at those same stars sometime. Wow. (Compassion for those who never get to see the sky)

As I gave the mosquitos their first Hannah's-ankles-feast of the year, I tried to look at my surroundings as through a camera. Dorothea Lange (famed photographer of "Migrant Mother") could see a photograph in any common object, and supposedly said to someone sitting near her deathbed, "I've just photographed you." Thinking of that, and Hark the Heron's suggestion to slow down and just watch what's right around you, I gazed around the patio, across the highway, at the table. A bug divebombed my hand and died on the table. It was a funny-looking bug, like a bit of bark with trailing wings. I blew on it gently and it rolled a few inches across the table. I guess some bugs in spring pretty much hatch, fly, mate, and die, falling out of the air for no particular reason other than they have no more purpose for living. For a moment I gazed across the highway again, trying to see a picture in a shaded house. When I looked back, the bug had revived. It glided across the table, regaining its sense of direction, then took a running leap back into the warm and wild evening. I got a picture of it on my cell phone just before it flew, but timing did not make up for poor equipment, and all you see in the picture is a reddish crumb. But I'm glad for the encouragement of other artists not to rush moments, but to watch for something simply interesting right under my nose.

sensaciones

In the living room a paling sunset softly lights the house.

Feelings. Sensations.

In my mind, thoughts and feelings--a loved one lost, but I know he's simply gone somewhere else. If I were convinced his very being was finished, my feelings would be completely different. Even so, there's a goodbye for now.

A soft day--mild sunshine, hugs, a kindred spirit. Reconnecting briefly with an old friend whose spirit is so kind, so comforting.

For a moment the sunshine intensifies to a tangible gold, before clouds soften the light to a purple. A fly spins on the window sill, the cockatiels in the cage make a general nonverbal clatter.

I feel something so serenely beautiful, I want to describe it, but I don't know what it is. It's the young leaves on the tree out the window with subtle blue and pink sky beyond. It's the stillness of the evening. It's the silence of the house, it's that last magenta sun ray blazing again. The paneled study door that stands open is not brown right now but lavender, magenta, black. This sunset is like a conversation, softening and brightening in still more vibrant beams.

I held his hand and read to him a few weeks ago. It was as though I grounded a current that ran in my veins, as I learned what a very old man's hand feels like, and it's not terrifying.

Could it could rain without actually raining? Or a cello serenade in gentleness without one edge to the tone, nothing to rasp in your ears?

A voice that is a gathering of tones, not a pitch.

Senses. Ever lie on the earth looking down at the stars, an endless fall below from which you're held by this glue called gravity?

How beautiful. Adoration and homage to the Maker.

the sign

When the world you know is falling apart

(when the ones you love leave you alone)

and no one can reach into your isolated heart

(so cold it is hard to breathe)

don't

give

up

your hope

Originality

You get a springboard of an idea and sit down at the piano.
You write some words, edit them, reshuffle them, fit them to some chords, and play and replay, til the song has a familiar ring to it.

The next day it sounds even more familiar. And you're bothered. Did you write it, or was all your work just a remembering of a song you've heard somewhere?

Helen Keller once wrote a little story which seemed to just flow as easily as a dream. A beautiful little story, her friends and family were excited to publish it. Only then, the author of a nearly identical story stepped forward. Sentiment turned against Helen for what looked like blatant plagiarism. Sometime or other, Anne Sullivan must have read it to her, but the memory faded enough to blend in with knowledge and resurface as a seeming original thought.

So in my passive absorption of music, I hope my own personality continually gets in the way of what could otherwise be unwitting plagiarism.