A Bit of Wisdom, A Bit of Folly

Love is a verb. It is how we meet and care for one another. A dance of anticipation. Mattering like nothing else. But more than transitive doing it is intransitive being. Watching the squirrel. Listening to the Bolero. Sharing cauliflower souffle.

God is a question………..and that’s not a bad thing. Though it isn’t a word in my vocabulary. An interrogation of the unknown. What we wonder.  The imponderable. 

Poetry creates silence….even as it sings. The poem blesses and it curses. It leaves a residue. It has tiny apertures for the reader to enter.  It goes beyond rhetoric, beyond all those words dead from exhaustion. Or it uses those words in new ways to reinvigorate them. It makes me wish I wrote them.

Morning is an exclamation point. The time when all those vivid dreams vanish. Maybe the melon ripened overnight. Maybe it hasn’t yet. The possibility of an intruder. How strange the banana looks all of a sudden from this angle. The eastern sun printing a bouquet on the wall. A chill different from the evening.

I’m growing a beard. It feels like a crop on the arable soil of my face. It has been in wait all these years, regularly mowed but now sprouting. Maybe I look like Sigmund Freud. If I leave it alone I’ll resemble Walt Whitman.

I just read a novel I greatly admired for the first 75 pages. Then it seemed like a one-note story. The author teetered brilliantly on the verge of the apocalyptic. As it went on it became more menacing and more unreal. I got bored. Why isn’t the human predicament enough without lapsing into dystopia? I regard that as a failure of the imagination.  Virginia Woolf didn’t need a comic book to explore the vast interior landscape.

Am I alone looking forward to the baseball season?  It restores order or at least the illusion of permanence. My metaphor for life………..precision (the infield) mingling with randomness (the outfield). The lesson of living with failure (the best team loses sixty games a year). I like to pretend it matters. Stats and the X factor. Slumps and streaks. Ultimately the triumph of the inexplicable.