Beyond Words

I want to write about things you can’t write about, beauties that are beyond words and can only be reduced to metaphors. Present and real and all around us, and yet ephemeral.

            Like the helium balloons I buy on a windy, dark night, wind on the top of a high ridge, where they cleared all the trees and built a Dollar Store and a parking lot. An omnipotent wind with nothing to stop it. I step out with a dozen stars in silver and blue and white, tethered to white ribbon. But the wind… Three of them are gone before I can herd them into the car, and I didn’t even see them go. I drive home with a back seat full of stars, jostling, searching for a way out.

            These things I wish I could write about are like those stars. Sparkling, buoyant, and always about to escape.

            Here’s a list.

            Shiloh in the night. I think I’m alone in the Universe, although I have lots of people I love, and who love me. I’ve made lists of them, because I forget. Three AM is the loneliest time in the Universe, and I am often awake then. But there’s a warm weight pressed against my legs. I reach for her and find softness that defies all the clichés. She’s heaven to touch, far beyond silk or velvet or down. Cat fur is softer than anything. And she is always there. She purrs, she snuggles closer, and if I turn on the light she smiles at me with utter love.

            Another one: the color of the sky as day turns to night. Any color you can name is a sad attempt. Lavender, azure, midnight… Those are opaque, flat, like wax crayons in a box. This is the color of light, itself, something totally other. To explain it with science, to call it magic, those both reduce it, too. Just call it the color of the sky at dusk, I guess. We have all seen it.

            What else?

Waking up with a man and a cat under flannel sheets the color of the sky in mid-morning in spring, and even if the man is annoyed because he’s on the edge of the bed because I’m in the middle, because the cat has somehow, with her little eight-pound body pushed me further and further—still it’s overwhelming bounty.

And friendship, longtime friendship. Patrick, how long has it been? Twenty-five years, maybe. I used to run Green Lake with him and his twenty-three-year-old daughter, who is now forty-something and a mom. Shot the wedding of his other daughter, now mother of two teenagers and getting divorced. She was a salsa dancer who could fill you with nameless things when she danced and now she’s a very fine poet. My friend, himself, who has seen me through my darkness and shown me his. We badger and tease eachother sometimes, and all of it is fine because he’s my friend.

There’s more. Fog shifting through the trees. Fresh snow on the mountain out my bathroom window. The popping and growing orange glow of a fire lit in the wood stove.

And whatever it is that makes me pick up a pen and a lined pad and try to do the impossible.