dylan

I am all alone. It is night and I am alone. My husband is patrolling street signs in another town, shining a flashlight on each one to make sure they still shimmer. It pays the bills--that and the mad house.

I was alone once for a long time. And now it is an absence I don't quite know how to fill. So this is what I do. Word play.

I am disturbed by song lyrics this evening. I was watching TV, nothing new, and a commercial began, the melody and lyrics of "catch the wind" (in case you don't know them as intimately as I):

In the chilly hours and minutes
of uncertainty
I long to be
in the warm hold
of your loving mind
just to feel you
all around me
and to take your hand
along the sand
ah, but I may as well
try and catch the wind.

when sundown pales the sky
I want to hide awhile
behind your smile
and everywhere I'd look
your eyes I'd find
for you to love me now
would be the sweetest thing
t'would make me sing
ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind.

Bob Dylan

I love that song. Now, I know it is the combination of those words and that music that softens my mood, that returns me to childhood--adolescence, really--days spent in hand-patched levis, cross-legged in Lithia Park, learning the melody on my first recorder, my only gift under a slim Christmas tree and the only thing that mattered to me, and what it took for my mother to make that happen...

But here's the thing........... I know I almost scared you with that sweet image, but really, that's the problem, isn't it? All of those images are used up: beaches, sunsets, romance, all that shit. It is so fucking difficult to find an original metaphor these days, these days where fist and bone have replaced heart and soul. And for those of us who put words together and take them apart for fun and torture, we are damned lucky if we can say what we mean and mean what we say, dodge trite and stay true. If we can say that which almost certainly has been said better, but not by us, and twist it one more time for the record, well good luck. The few the proud, the verbose. But we are many, now, and the metaphors show some wear here in blogland.

It was beautiful when he wrote it, and when I heard it and knew it for poetry, and was captured.