Wave Your Arms and Behold the Sky

The fruit bowl on the table convinced me that we had become more real than our paintings.  Strange, really, the power of its persuasion to this end.  Fruit bowls, usually wooden like the one on our table, were so often the quaint background to images that quietly captured someone else's profundity.  Painters like to use things like fruit bowls to say something equally simple and amazing about their subjects. Geniuses kept fruit bowls on their tables in cabins a day's travel from anywhere.  And dramatically melted, unburning candles.  Yeah, melted candles next to fruit bowls, in solitude, in ambiguously weathered kitchens in cabins in nowhere; those are places geniuses live.  That's why we paint them.

So I was surprised how little I cared about the fruit bowl or our weathered kitchen or the over-used splashes of parafin that were once candles strewn all about our cabin home, a day's drive from anywhere.  Because he left the room like he was going to throw up his heart.
 He clutched his chest like he was in pain and if it were a trail of blood he left on the floor behind him I would have followed him more slowly.  But he didn't leave anything at all.  Nothing visual at least.  And he was smiling, so I supposed, it wasn't really his heart.  But I ran nonetheless.  My barefeet creaked across the cabin floor and pushed open the screen door, stretching the spring and hearing it slam behind me like cabin doors in summer seem to.

We're a confused bunch, to be sure.  We love and despise language but we mean the best by it.  When one of us goes running - and it happens with some frequency - we trust that it's worth following suit.  And mostly we're right.  You see, we love language and we despise it.  But we mean the best.  So sometimes, running is the next sentence.  You won't hear it if you don't run too.

My obsession with dewy grass beneath barefeet seems boyish, but its only gotten stronger the older I've grown.  Between the damp, dark yard and each night's sky I'm being talked to from the bottoms of my feet to the holes in my eyes.  Its only more and more an incredible thing.

I watched my friend crumple in the lawn beyond the arms of the floodlight and I suspected I knew why.  He'd finally finished it.  He'd set down a great weight but parted with a confidante.  Inside, he'd finished a manuscript that contained all there ever was and will be of a world he invented, the people he birthed, criticized, punished and enlightened.  I think he knew that as god of that world, he had concluded his role.  Now it only existed for interpretation.  The clay would harden and once displayed, remain beyond the corrective desires of his hand.  Such a strange relationship with language, we have.