Bayou Boy

I knew you as a boy

Oblivious to your admiration

Tide pulling you to me in

Starry eyed illumination

While I just waxed and waned,

shrouded in my brakish fog…

 

Now I know you as a man

Seriously driven

With eyes not starry but shining still

I thrill at your attention

Then and now,

head turned towards my silvered

gelatin kisses, no longer so oblivious.

 

I wonder about you?
What shines behind those sleeping eyes?
Am I tugging on your dreaming shores?
What lies there?  Flotsam from the past?
So far removed now from bayou’s breath,
from streams and home and permanence,
I watch in shifting phases:

 

Shadowed  timekeeper of our sky

Shared once, shared still…

No-one has to know but us?

My nightly runnings through your glass,
Drifting in dreamland's technicolored bayou brilliance.
 

Now rising in our morning's purple waking haze,

I'm reflecting in your bayou's gaze.

God, Pet Semetary, Tolstoy and Ravi ~ Improvising truth.

In the olden days, I believe Mozart also improvised on piano, but somehow in the last 200 years, the whole training of Western classical music - they don't read between the lines, they just read the lines.

Ravi Shankar

 

 

 

This has been a very weird, Jungian, connect the dots, kind of week.  First I had a quote from (of all things) Pet Semetary rattling around in my head.  It was the scene where Jud was discussing Missy’s suicide with the main character, the doctor, Louis.  Jud says, “God sees the truth, but waits.”

Hmmmm…

I googled that phrase because it seemed just a little too good to be something uttered by a supporting character in a movie.  Sure enough, I’m correct. Turns out, that’s the title of the short story by Leo Tolstoy.  So now I’m wikipedia’ing the plot of the story:

"God Sees the Truth, But Waits"(Russian: "Бог правду видит, да не скоро скажет", "Bog pravdu vidit da ne skoro skazhet") is a short story by Russian author Leo Tolstoy first published in 1872. The story, about a man sent to prison for a murder he didn't commit, takes the form of a parable of forgiveness. English translations were also published under titles "The Confessed Crime" and "Exiled to Siberia". The concept of the story of a man wrongfully accused of murder and banished to Siberia also appears in one of Tolstoy's previous works, "War and Peace", during a philosophical discussion among two characters who relate the story and argue how the protagonist of their story deals with injustice and fate.

 

Reading that paragraph was no less than an epiphany to me. “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” anyone? A tunnel even plays into the story….I can’t make this kind of stuff up! I mean, King totally ripped off that plot right?  No offense Mr. King if you happen to be reading this (my attempt at sarcasm.) I mean they say there are only 5 basic plots ever written and we all re-form those plots to our liking but recently tunnels and domes have been showing up as little breadcrumbs probably telling me as a writer that “It’s okay to NOT reinvent the wheel here. After all one of your favorite authors didn’t!”

This simmers in my head.

So finally another favorite of mine shows up just in time to tie this week neatly together:  Mr. Ravi Shankar. I love improvisational baroque kinds of music, especially meditative ones and find his Ragu Piloo on “West meets East” exquisite.  I spin it often in my cd player, but this week I pulled it out and more than once made myself late to listen to the whole Raga.  I also happen to stumble on his daughter’s homage to him recently and one of the quotes was what I’ve placed at the top of the page. ^^

I laughed.

I’m all **about** reading between the lines. It’s what I do because no matter how rational and pleasing I try to be, I can’t help but do it because life is more fun this way---and makes more sense.  See, to me we are all God’s truth? We all have a divine purpose here on this earth, and that purpose is glaringly apparent in our youth as we find our talents.  But in our efforts to “be successful” and be pleasing in other’s eyes, we tend to just read the lines because we’re programmed that is what we’re supposed to doing. We create a cycle also because that is what we teach our children to do as well, to trust our “knowledge” instead of their intuition.

I don’t think it is what we’re supposed to be doing at all?

I think we’re supposed to be improvising.

And that is our truth.