Rambling...

Steve Curtin. http://www.stevecurtin.com/

I like to ramble, but I get lost in it.  They say Dylan Thomas wrote near the end of life that "the words will not lie down."  Now I know just what he meant; and friends and family feel the full force of it, too.  I say a thing, or more likely, write a thing, but it isn't quite what I mean and I keep repeating it but refining what I don't like... lost in an obsession to express a meaning, but forgetting the meaning in all those words.

I repeat it again, and he looks back at me with the pained expression of acute suffering as he says for the third time, "I know; I understand."

But I know he can't, not really, because I haven't truly said it yet.  Ah, me.  Hundreds of words, and only a single right one.  I know I can find it, fit it together piece by shining piece, a perfectly expressed thought or feeling, fragile and beautiful like a spider's web... but not before he gives up on my rambling, kisses me goodbye and leaves for work.  Leaves me exasperated and still trying one more phrase on like a girl trying on all the clothes in a friend's closet.

The truth is upon me but I generally refuse to acknowledge it, standing in the corner like Caesar's ghost. Meaning will never be perfectly expressed.  No matter what I do, or how I try, those with greater mercurial powers than I have had to admit defeat before.  "The words will not..." quite... "lie down."

Anonymous. www.commons.wikimedia.org

  That orbed maiden with white fire laden

Whom mortals call the Moon,

Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor

By the midnight breezes strewn;

And wherever the beat of her unseen feet

Which only the angels hear,

May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,

The stars peep behind her and peer.."

                       -P.B. Shelley, "The Cloud"

I was thinking of this verse when I saw the new background for Scieppan with the moon in it, and went looking for a picture to go with it.  I chose this one because it reminds me of a place I saw in Poland, Łasienki Park in Warsaw.  I loved Łasienki better than anywhere else I visited; whether because of the pert, tuft-eared red squirrels, or the water birds skidding on the thin ice, or the beautiful neoclassical ruins, erected as such because it was considered so romantic during that period.

Łasienki Park, Nov. 2011

Łasienki Park, Nov. 2011