the sky is wet
The south, oh yes, the south, I wonder about the south in all its burden, brutality and brilliance, I wonder about courtroom dramas and insects, about vision being shone unto folks. Visions of Razorback! Great Spanish Galleons! Sharks swimming down from the sky amidst sheets of torrential rain and screaming winds! All of the buildings are to be torn down, their ghosts to be resurrected and inspired, and we will be inhabited, sad and beautiful. Oh yes, the south. You know what feels so good? Becoming stranded. Relief and abandon. As in creeks that tell story and hummingbird ballets and fountains speaking baths drawn in great tiled rooms. The ceiling fan whispers mosquito to me. I wander about, setting buckets in the rain and watching drops glide from leaves. I wonder about spending a lifetime in that lambent shimmer. I have gone back home, hung two lanterns on the porch and set myself down into the porchswing at this very moment tomorrow morning in light years and who calls that a year? And the sparse office of an old doctor who leans against his desk and scumbles, and he's filling out a prescription, is it meant for me? And he's gazing out the window laughing at a joke wholly internal and I am earthwhile confused as he moves floating to the medicine cabinet and the light changes abruptly and perspective and we are in long shot, long thin and suffocating, shooting the scene in short breaths, leaving untouched the front of the frame and so this space rests between our worlds and I am sitting on the edge of the bed, legs dangling, arms braced to either side and paper crinkles between me and the mattress in this country doctor's office that is shrinking with the thought, and I barely seem to be breathing, drenched in a thin, white t-shirt, a t-shirt clinging to my body by sweat, it is not the heat that will kill you it is the humidity. Fade to black. A radio plays, distant and close, the sound of a small portable radio you can just hear muffled in an adjacent room and we are listening to a ballad of small butterflies. Fade in. The morning following rain, and our world is saturated, awet, the sense is one of glistening and we are in medium close-up on a porchswing swinging empty framed by rich deep green forest in the background beyond a stretch of close-cut lawn, forest breathing and exuding, and we can just make out now the sound of a conversation rising into life, one-sided, a conversation into telephone just inside the house from the porch and we know it to be conversation though the words are unintelligible, understood language of foreign origin but we have little time to grasp this notion because the conversation fades and we hear only the world glistening beyond this porch and porchswing swinging empty strung from chain and then eventually that too fades.
posted by j | 9:07 AM
