Notebook

I watch as the whole country slides by below the wing.
Deep red clays and burned out browns, followed by snow bleached peaks
and now the flat geometry of the middle lands.
Hundreds of miles of patchwork squares and circles, an occasional
building group here or there isolated and tiny city clusters shrinking
in the capillary sprawl, grey and lifeless from above.
What is this all about?
The ground moving does not really alter my perspective up here.
Nothing seems to affect my view these days.
My life beyond stable, static.
35 years, 10 years, almost 5 years.
All these time line hash marks seem have ground me to a halt.
How do dreams and hopes end up frozen?
How can I get back that burning desire?
I am at a standstill now.
The days goes in and out and I get nowhere.
Still no great clang of astonishment, no brilliant flash of light,
no steeple with a wide view.
All that surrounds me, all the things that I have gathered and continue to gather
at such an obscene rate seem to be stones tied to the cuff.
Weights to make the freedom of the river that much harder to realize.
And all these stupid metaphors, what is one to do?
The idea of chucking it all seem so inviting.
To throw myself headlong into a love affair with some beautiful unknown person.
Or a trip off alone in the wilds never looking back.
But I can't help myself I must always look back.
Life is so beautiful in the rearview, everything in golden light and very still.
Faces and places, feelings, thoughts, embalmed forever.
That wall in Chapel Hill.
Karen lying on the bed by that sunshaded window, Johnson City,
listening for footsteps and not yet through.
The soft mountains green at 7 years old and 8 and 9.
Laurie's face in that photograph.
The old Volkswagen parked by the gate of those brown fields.
That red tractor leaving traces as it plotted across before Tom and I
our eyes wild with it.
La sagrada familia in Barcelona.
Los Angeles palmtrees looming like endless flagpoles and reflected overhead
in the rear windows like arching spiders.
Hovering just 20 minutes ago above the cotton ball clouds.
The first gig in Berlin, Mud Club with the gate coming down.
The stained glass windows of St.Tom's seen close up in movie camera view.
All the envelopes full of tiny snapshots collecting dust.
My mother as a small girl in a burnished white dress.
My wife as a young mother.
All the girls who's initials have been L.S.
The feeling of almost drowning beneath a glassy blue surface.
Kissing Mary in the dark.
Old movies my first attempts all hazy and bleached out blue.
Cody in his leather jacket.
Amanda driving the old wrecked blue plymouth across the Canadian landscape.
My life in a frozen moment a fly's eyes faceted view of all the moments
which make up the full strand.
Do any of these moments mean even the slightest thing?
Michael dragging off the opium pipe in the shaded green of his back yard.
How much easier if the past were a black hole if we had amnesia.
Bright sun skating it's way and fractured kite like beads through
the pine trees outside Susan's house.
How many of my memories are created or reinforced by the documentation
of them?
Do we film events only to be able to see them in retrospect?
To see them as though they were the actual moments themselves
burned onto our retina?
To see them as though they were really what we saw at the time?
I don't really remember anything.
I only recall pictures, snapshots of events I may have been present at.
Televised pictures of the revolution no where near here on mine too.
I recall written words of my own past equally with those of times and
places I have little business knowing anything about.
I never really been to sea, never driven down an endless straight ribbon of
highway into the next state, never floated on a swiss alpine lake or borrowed
deep into the earth fossil corridor of time.
Is it even possible to reach out and touch another person?
To dent their flesh with my fingertips?
Why all the conventions the walls to prevent such happenings?
What can you show me?
What can I tell you?
How many years have we been apart?
Where have you been all my life?
When can I see you again?
I'm sick of the sight of you.
All the dichods head butting me one against the other.
Tearing my soul in two directions at once.
Ripping at the seams of my consciousness.
Babbling on and on in my mind.

by Lee.