What’s a good metaphor for your love, Love?
Your love might be like light through a glass honey jar, hefted in the hand.
Diffused through granular anticipated delight.
Or maybe it’s like the honey itself, viscous, poured out reluctant, coming on its own time, a fine amber stream in the sun
Or else recalcitrant in the bottle, hard, crystallized. Not coming, never coming.
Or maybe your love is like falling down the stairs, arms legs flying landing in a heap with thud.
Oh hey, lover and object of love why such a jarring metaphor?
Fear.
Distrust, Dread. A dark foreboding which unfolds in my breast like a spider.
It replaced my thoughts of love (sorry Love) with a quick thought of falling down the stairs.
A certain dark stairwell.
A dark certain stairwell.
And why is there a spider in my breast? I don’t know, ask him.
I’m sitting, waiting for a wayward moth to come (he says).
A flitter a flutter, you know how moths fly. Never in a straight line.
So the spider put some thoughts in me. And some expressions on my face and maybe a pain in my back that makes me walk with a trudge and a slump and a not-here-ness.
Trudging with my mind somewhere else.
I went to buy some blackberries today.
I used to pick them with my sister. My mom would send us, and we’d fill up buckets, like characters in a children’s book except we were real.
I bought blackberries from the Korean market and they were just sweet enough but not too sweet. Fat and plump. I stuffed big handfulls in my mouth.
On the way out a woman was asking for spare change. My change was 65 cents so I gave it to her.
Sometimes I give to people who ask of me; sometimes I don’t. The Bible says to give to whoever asks of you.
That’s one of those verses that’s in a grey area right? Like, we dont *always* have to do that, right? Kind of like selling everything we have and give to the poor.
Crazy talk.
I’m trudging home. Partly because my back hurts. I’ve locked my bike up. I’m walking back to my bike.
A guy smiles at me, he’s smoking, talking on the phone, but he goes out of his way to smile and make a gesture that says he saw me.
I smile back, wave.
He’s the manager of the store where I buy groceries sometimes. It’s a very small supermarket as supermarkets in NY tend to be.
They used to carry this salmon in a bag and they would run out and I’d pester him for more until they got more in on the truck.
But the salmon in a bag stopped coming and I stopped pestering him.
The spider tells me to worry, and I do. I’m obedient to it. Jesus said not to worry. is that one of those things to obey, or is that a grey area like giving everything to the poor?
Either way I’m disobeying it. I’m obeying the spider. What if, what if so and so withholds love or this good thing doesn’t happen or this bad thing does happen?
Maybe your love is like a guy trudging weighed-down down the street trying not to think about falling down the stairs.
Yep it is.
I forgot to say when I got home I gave some blackberries to a friend.
A friend at home. She was watching final jeopardy. She held out her hand, freshly washed, and I put my unwashed blackberry stained hand in the blackberry container
and pulled out 4 blackberries.
I dropped the 4 blackberries in her hand. She ate them, and made an absent-minded “mmm” silent chewing sound.
I heard it but didn’t hear it.
My mind was not there,
it was on the stairs,
or with the spider,
waiting for his moth.