Interlude

[poliphilo]

CATALONIA

This is the first time I've walked with a stick since I was 17. the stick is bamboo, very light, with a plastic handle that looks like horn.

I am up on the evening hill among broken stones and black umbrella pines. The girl band down in the Placa d'Espanya is so loudly amplified that even we wanderers in rarified air can sing along .

What is that noise the sea makes- is it a sigh, a groan, a whisper? It is all these and more. It is the voice of our lovers past and to come. As a noble Roman once remarked, "all human knowledge comes from the sea."

Ma and pa seagull go winging past, level with me but still high up. Do birds ever die in mid-flight? Has anyone seen it happen? The aloes sprawl on the blue-grey cliffs like angels. If I were to drop off the edge I would look like that.

Behind my eyes is a circle. In one half are the girls in the band, in the other the waves of the sea. They address one another like centaurs and lapiths. There is no clear line between them, just a zone of pulse and shiver.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

A beautiful poem about the sea-

I saw a hawk fall from the sky--it didn't plunge; rather, it dropped.

It had been flying steadily across a kuzdu-vine field, and Kate and I were watching as we drove along the highway.

As soon as it fell, Kate (then eleven or so) begged me to stop the car so she could save it! She wanted to wade right out into the tangled kudzu.

We had quite a little crisis in the car, Kate the compassionate and Mom the hardened and indifferent parent who kept driving (grimly).

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

So birds do die on the wing. I wonder what your hawk died of- heart failure?

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

It saddens me to say it, but probably someone shot it.

I hate guns.

I think I told you about the beautiful whistling swan that for some wondrous reason settled on a nearby river for awhile, and people came from miles around to see after a news program mentioned it.

And some dolt with a rifle shot it, because he could.

I wonder if that is the same mechanism that operates for stalkers--a way to touch something that is numinous, a way to identify and become intimate with and finally to attempt to own that numinousness, even if the possession of it kills what is beautiful.

When I see a bird like a hawk soaring on a high air current, it does seem to feel joy. In a way, I yearn to join it and identify with it as I watch--I can almost feel how the wind would feel under its wings. The dark side of that yearning for some, I think, might be to actually connect, sadly, with a bullet.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of the movie The Collector- where a sad young man keeps a girl imprisoned in his cellar because he wants to own her beauty.

I think you're right about the psychology of the hunter. The hunter identifies with his prey and by killing it becomes it. Isn't that what Hemingway is on about in The Old Man and The Sea?

[queen-in-autumn.livejournal.com]

These entries have all been so very beautiful. . . . Especially this one.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thank you. This means a lot.