cover of book, stray birds R.Tagore (1916)


WEEK EIGHT. conversation by clair and charlie

 

8

Her wistful face haunts my dreams like the rain at night.  Tagore

                                                                            ~  ~  ~ 

The sound of rattling nails wet against a midnight window scratches open my eyes. I feel her fingers on my neck, like a gallows touch, tracing where the noose should go.  Her hair drips red dye onto my white cotton sheets, repeated slowly again and again, a dream stuck in the moment of a stain I cannot lose.  Do I dream her, or is she dreaming me?  Her face turns, seductively, secretly, a smile half hiding a snarl. The roses have left the vase, petals into ash.  I try to go back to the seed of us, lost in vodka shots with grains of gold and cherry lips eloquently murmuring on Dostoevsky, long before we kissed among brambles of a deep French wood.

If I reach to hold your silver hand it feels like scars fusing in the blood and puss of a beautiful love turned bitter beneath the moon.   You said to leave your life, but she keeps returning, reminding me never to find the footsteps that might lead me across snowdrifts and sandbanks of sleep, to this awakening.  A drop of sweat from my forehead mixes with an eye's slow tear. The end of rain is dripping from my iron guttering, like your stilletoes running away, like the echo of my own breath will vanish. 

charlie

the roses have left the vase.

feelings are so transient, such an unknown quantity...they were in full bloom, they were so real. they had me thinking that i was in love.  and so thus i was. surrounded totally and beautifully and held and left free. 

as we grow in years we get so clever... so 'in the know', and in the same moments, (and in the same amounts) we get deeper and deeper and much more lost and more lost.  perfect balance. natures little balancing act.
cl



The wistful face that haunts is the expression of knowing we etch upon the skin of memory.  We find new eyes to shape reality through experience, but look back to reread the past like a favourite book or game, finding new levels, deeper meanings that reward knowledge with more to understand.  Perhaps the face is but a mirror to my own searching, looking back at me ahead, as though two figures in a tug-of-war of definition. At least the rain at night replenishes, even as it destroys.  Rivers always reach for the sea.
ch

yes, i love to look to nature and animals for the answers that get lost in humans self consciousness and inhibitions.  like the river running to the sea. like the birds building their nests in trees.  like the ants carring grains of found sugar back for tea. 

.. ..

V  v 

cl

... Like a world bigger than me.

Why does she  choose to haunt me?  Why does the rain and night possess me? Why am I  me at all.

 In such transience, I recall the magic of a human quality to create the shape of things, like colours in a palette of possibility. And of all the dark and light mixed on canvas: her face, rain, a night, expose me as nothing more than images and thoughts in the sensation of life. 

My dreams haunt her face. Her night haunts my rain. 

I ache always for the touch of soft skin or water to remind me of me.

How intoxicating it is to be haunted, or a heart carried by an ant.
ch



the rain haunts the night.  the night haunts its' sky.
ants love carrying hearts.  they are their perfect size.
 (and full of delicious strawberries and cream .)). hee hee
clair


thanks charlie poet. X