Simple Signs and Wonders

Simple Signs and Wonders
copyright 2008 Danielle D. Billington



The building, a concrete monolith, the concrete cold seeping into the skin, stealing the soul and breath of almost all who enter within. Inside, it could have been anyone’s office. A typically tiny sterile colorless box, but…A framed map of South America, an embroidered hummingbird on linen, books on any and every subject from haiku to fractals, though it was perhaps a tad more disorganized, as if a tornado whipped through and deposited things randomly into every available space. Books, papers, pictures, pens…she was always loosing her keys underneath things. She is the setting, the setting is her. I told someone once; the office woman, she is beautiful and clumsy, with soft skin the color of Maxfield Parish women and eyes, sleepy brown eyes which I am certain gaze into the infinite, and she has wavy brown hair with hidden breaths of gray, which make her adored even more on the days she has not hidden them with store bought dye. She is under the same thundering skies as I. It rains in her office. She says the rain never touches her. Imagine the flurry of falling drops parting in waves around her. Birds sing liquid songs and ants march in neat lines across the floor.
I am full of trepidation upon entering, it is like stepping across the invisible threshold at the louvre, setting off the alarm, stealing the Mona Lisa’s smile, carrying it in the palm of your hand running through the halls while security guards chase after shouting in French symbolist poetry. As always, I spent too much time there, in the woman’s office, interpreting signs and wonders. I couldn’t help it, and being neurotic, I analyzed it. Yet still, the office was a vast portal taking me away from the mundane. It spit out ideas, thoughts, poetry, stories at the speed and force of a thundering train, despite its hideous bland beige carpeting. Can fractals be used to determine human beauty? Are mathematical patterns embedded in Aztec embroidery? Would you read someone’s journal if they left it behind? I knew it was a swirling mesmerizing vortex of enticement. It was the anticipation of a lap dance waiting to happen, the twenty-dollar bill dangling. I want to place my hands on it, divine its secrets, moving its dark blue electrical energies around at the tips of my fingers as if it were a crystal ball.
For someone, such as I, who could, and did easily sleepwalk and daydream through every moment of mundane daily existence, this space, this simple space made time pass unnoticed, improbable, and what it contained shocked me awake like a not murderous lightening strike. The gift of rain, the burst of awake, like citrus sprayed in your face without the sting. So good, too good, it must be a dream from which you never want to wake.

“Do you understand?” She always asks me, looking into my eyes intently.
“I understand nothing but beauty…as clear and as crystalline as ice.” I reply.
But nothing ever happens.

Time stops, stars start, turn, and drop, and as always the spell breaks as I cross back through the heavy and scarred thick wooden door. Entering the everyday, falling asleep so fast as if sandman, moon stars and all, were sprouting in my consciousness, rooting there, spreading drowsy inducing tendrils. I must leave, returning to the continuous motion-- the velocity of unrest.


(My writing Prof told me it was too philosophical. I like to tell and sometimes show.)

Ego

"'I' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms."
— Clarice Lispector (The Passion According to G.H.)

Remebrance of things past

Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

by William Shakespeare

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times' waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

A little something

Love Poem in Gibberish?
_____________________________
I tried, but nothing came...
She said to write you a love poem in gibberish
But I can't because you make sense to me
your lips and hips
the sunken curves of you
your face the golden ratio
your mind the black sea heavy with storms