A Story about Longing
Once --- so long ago that only the most ancient of the turtles would remember his name and then only if turtles cared about names, which they do not --- a man fell in love with a tiger lily.
It ended, as these things do. I won't say well or badly.
Between a man and a tiger lily, what beautiful thing could happen, except the ending?
This breaks my heart. Beautiful Daylily. xo
ReplyDeletedeath intrinsic to life? endings to beginnings? the relationship, when one thing tips back and touches the other, love? always?
ReplyDeletealways.
even the tiger lily herself an emblem of relationship and love, stamen, stigma, anthers, sepal, carpels, petals. she is an act of life and death, a demonstration of love)))
and your attention to her is this same thing.
so, too, conversations with turtles:)
it's marvelous!!! it is like one of those mysterious short gems that Kafka wrote, an enigma which retains its ambiguity to the end, and never ceases to attract us, and speaks endlessly and in an infinite of different ways about life and death and meaning and communication...
ReplyDeletethis, from his Conversation with the supplicant (it enters in an essential dialogue with your piece, i think):
The young man standing opposite me smiled. The he dropped on his knees and with a dreamy look on his face told me, "There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are not fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that then they were clam and beautiful. It must be so, for I often near people talking about them as though they were."
Since I made no answer and only though involuntary twitchings in my face betrayed my uneasiness, he asked, "Don't you believe that people talk like that?"
I knew I ought to nod assent but couldn't do it.
"You don't really believe it? Why, listen; once when I was a child and just waking up from a short afternoon nap, still half asleep, I heard my mother calling own from the balcony in the most natural voice, 'What are you doing, my dear? It's so hot.' And a woman answered from the garden, 'I'm reveling in the grass.' She said it quite simply and without insistence, as if it were to be taken for granted."