Prodigal Daughter.

I've never seen the blackest of nights emerge so luminous as Wednesday did. Missed the pinnacle of the eclipse by half and hour, but was shocked to gaze upon the snow-glazed hills behind the house as they radiated the moonglow hours later... so bright and crystalline, so illuminated in the night. The kind of world one imagines the Masters were envisioning in their nocturnes, quiet and serene. Alive but hushed in that ethereal pause of night. A rare moment of appreciation, reward for sleeplessness.

This week has been the second half of the boomerang effect, a return to origin, home, status quo to a degree. That which goes up must, inevitably, fall back to earth again. Being home - for the first time since the new year - was refreshing. Complicated, even through my whiskey-colored glasses. Troubling on an internal level, like some small undercurrent of hysteria bubbling just below the surface. We stand on the brink of change, and for the first time none of us is certain of what will happen next. So many unknowns, so many long-buried secrets and repressed feelings... spring has undoubtedly become our season of 'airing out the laundry,' 'spring cleaning,' what have you.

It has been a long and difficult three years.

[I don't know what to write to him.]

This is further compounded by a relentless headache and desire to escape into the beckoning arms of fantasy - a book, a movie, a poem, the piano, something. I feel paralyzed by reality, frozen in the high-beams. How much longer can I postpone my life?, I keep demanding of myself. What catalyst will finally end my inertia? For god's sake, what must I do to overcome this irrational, self-defeating fear? What changes are necessary? What sacrifices?

I must clean something. 'Dirty house, dirty life,' I always say. Frustratingly, just one week ago I did the same thing and have returned after so many days away to a home in the same state of perpetual messiness as before I devoted so many a long hour eradicating the dust of winter life.

I think today is a day to dig the Xanax out of the cabinet. This hostility is ridiculous. I cannot let this affect me, I must be positive and clear and open to the world... the February sun is making a rare appearance, after all.

Not going out tonight. Not. Not. Not.

"Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?" - James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

_____________________________

The Moment

It was a day in June, all lawn and sky,
the kind that gives you no choice
but to unbutton your shirt
and sit outside in a rough wooden chair.

And if a glass of ice tea and an anthology
of seventeenth-century devotional poetry
with a dark blue cover are available,
then the picture can hardly be improved.

I remember a fly kept landing on my wrist,
and two black butterflies
with white and red wing-dots
bobbed around my head in the bright air.

I could feel the day offering itself to me,
and I wanted nothing more
than to be in the moment - but which moment?
Not that one, or that one, or that one,

or any of those that were scuttling by
seemed perfectly right for me.
Plus, I was too knotted up with questions
about the past and his tall, evasive sister, the future.

What churchyard held the bones of George Herbert?
Why did John Donne's wife die so young?
And more pressingly,
what could we serve the vegetarian twins

we had invited for dinner that evening
not knowing then that they travel with their own grapes?
And who was the driver of that pickup
flying down the road toward the single railroad track?

And so the priceless moments of the day
were squandered one by one -
or more likely several thousand at a time -
with quandary and pointless interrogation.

All I wanted was to be a pea of being
at rest inside the pod of time,
but that was not going to happen today,
I had to admit to myself

as I closed the blue book on the face
of Thomas Traherne and returned to the house
where I lit a flame under a pot
full of water where some eggs were afloat,

and, while they were cooking,
stared into a little oval mirror by the sink
just to see if that crazy glass
had anything particular to say to me today.

- Billy Collins