February 23, 2012

Thin fog, enough to obscure the sky without being so thick you can't see the trees.  There is just enough wind to keep it from settling in and causing hazardous conditions.  A north wind, a change in the weather . . . since they predicted more than 80 degrees today perhaps the little cool front came in early.  Every time that weather man talks about winter, I wonder where he lives, since we have not had so much winter here, even I wouldn't mind a few normal winter days sometime before it's spring for certain, but though it looks pretty wintery out there this morning, I know it's just face not fact.

The wind has shredded the little bit of fog, the sky is lowering and darkening, as if the day does not know whether it is coming or going.

 “Between Going and Staying the Day Wavers”

Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

Octavio Paz

And outside the pause is between night and day, between fog and storm, between wind and its falling off.  The school bus, bright yellow blur, keeps its routine, the cars carry people out to their daily work.  I am the pause, sitting here, listening to all the chimes, watching the day try to make up its mind.  Perhaps all day the sky will change, perhaps the only thing that will not change is how the light changes at each moment, that light near as breathing and no way to touch it, or hold it, or keep it from changing.  No one names the changes of light, perhaps that is why we cannot hold them, we have no name for their infinite variety and so they slip away, they keep scattering, as the wind scatters fog.  That might be their blessing to us, something we cannot name . . .