pelagicmoon

[pelagicmoon]

there sat a bearded man with a saxophone that with the right lighting looked like an extension of his beard. he played and played but the only sound that came out was swimming pool chlorine snoring. and then the cicadas started blaring snottily.

the two of them watched this bearded man as he seemed to be swaddled back and forth by his charcoaled saxophone. the florist thought that this Pharoah Sanders bobblehead would have, oddly, been less of a saxophonist had he been audible. an ambulance in the distance of the broken-nosed breed, its siren not quite full enough in inferno.

“i bought a lizard from him once,” told the nymph. “it was this weird russet one with blue eyes. you could see the universe in them.”

“blue eyes, but it wasn’t blue at first. at first it had grey eyes. when i met it. then my cat died. it was run over by a Volkswagen Jetta. my cat had blue eyes. it seems this lizard inherited those blue eyes. so it’s a lizard with the soul of a lizard and the soul of a cat.

my lizard couldn’t bear the soul of a cat and kicked the bucket. i guess it was the chromosomal mismatches–”

the soul of a cat, the florist thought. i wonder if my soul would go anywhere if i get run over by a car. but my eyes don’t have the universe in them. they only got the face of who’s looking at me. “did this… lizard… also get run over?”

“–no. i just forgot to feed it. poor little guy.”

[pelagicmoon]

yesterday i met a dragonfly named God ///

6/23/24 sunday

“To write is to objectify dreams, to create an outer world as a material reward [?] of our nature as creators.”

-The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

the more i tell it to people the more i become a heretic because by making this a story i’m confining the sky and the mountains and the nightfall to my own cage like i’m running some sort of freak show. the desire to write is the nefarious drive to possess.

andrew and i were walking in a certain part of the catskills we had been visiting. in a group who had decided to hike up a mountain nearby, it was only the two of us that decided to track back to the lodge when it began darkening. the sun was disappearing. the air was cold because of the altitude. there was the looming threat of bears.

we had already made our way down the mountain and now we trod upon a roughish road that wound pretty thinly. our phones picked up no service. along our way, sparsely, stood houses that seemed to be getting strangled by the sun’s afterglow. by god the sky was so open and so pink, like some perfect fruit.

at about this time i had noticed an insect by my side. many insects had already been hailing (or had it been dust) towards my body and it was difficult to resist the temptation to wipe my arm through the air. but at the same time i’d started to recognize that we humans were closest to these insects in our fundamental tininess of our individual influences on the great world. this insect, though, whom i’ll call a dragonfly because that’s one of the only insect names i know, had appeared a couple paces back, and instead of flying off haphazardly was staying with me. i found this odd and pointed it out to andrew.

as we continued, we approached a husk of a cabin on the left side of the road. ominously behind it and nearly sinking into a stream was a shed that was spray-painted with a message that read something like “fish for sale, on demand”. apparently andrew saw an old couple watching television in the house, although i saw nothing of the kind.

i heard later that he had been considering knocking on their door for some sort of help or direction. as he was doing so, i had reminded him a second time (it had already been about ten minutes of walking) that the dragonfly was still with us. i mentioned that this little insect was escorting us down the road. now apparently the cabin he was looking at had this morbid aura, and although i didn’t really think about it at that time, i’ll believe him. he told me that the second time, he really took account of the dragonfly, and retrospectively that this dragonfly had urged him past the cabin.

we got back to the lodge eventually, partially due to the help of a woman with a young child and a dog, who had passed us by in her car and turned back to ask where we were going.

and yet i feel like our “safety” from that supposedly unwelcoming cabin was only the materialistic way our human minds could perceive the benevolence this dragonfly had bestowed on us. if i were to even come close to truly respecting the dragonfly with human words, i’d use the word “mother”. maybe someone will tell me it was just a mosquito that was looking to feed off of us. no matter– it is already an honor that somebody decided to join us. i really felt as if i was in some type of heaven and that i did not belong there. i am fortunate to have been not only spared by the things there, but also placed under their care.

i often say that there are two types of people: secular people and asecular people. secular people love things. asecular people don’t really love because things, including their own bodies, seem too small for them to scrutinize, except when it’s when love is without direction and surrounds them like the air or something. i felt surrounded evenly and uncompromisingly with that love that time i met the dragonfly. every time i swat at an insect on my leg, i am sinning. i should be happy that somebody loves me that much.

take me home, country roads