guillemots - "if the world ends" (from the through the window pane lp, import available for purchase here.)

my dearest friend, her deepest fear is the end of the world. not her own death, mind, but everyone else's--and the destruction of the world, too. it make sense w/ me : i left my old job once to go elsewhere : it wasn't nearly so sad as when we closed & the whole damned thing came tumbling down.

it makes sense to me : i've barely seen her shed a tear for herself, which awes me given the things she's gone through. i have seen her cry for people she doesn't know; tears, too, that don't seem so much like they've been pushed out of her eyes as like they've jumped, her sadness that profound. after the last time--well, the mascara never did come out of that t-shirt, which doesn't keep me from wearing it anyway.

she's my dearest friend, regardless of how i stand w/ her. i've seen so little of her, heard so little from her recently, and i don't know why that should be so, but i know that i miss the hell out of her. the upside is that all those frustrated & unresolved daytime thoughts become my evening's entertainment : the most time i've spent w/ her of late was in a dream. which reminds me of a poem by robert desnos:

I've dreamed of you so much you're losing your reality.

Is there still time to reach that living body and kiss
onto that mouth the birth of the voice so dear to me?

I've dreamed of you so much that my arms, accustomed
to being crossed on my breast while hugging your shadow,
would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.

And, faced with the real appearance of what has haunted
and ruled me for days and years, I would probably
become a shadow.

O sentimental balances.

I've dreamed of you so much it's no longer right
for me to awaken. I sleep standing up, my body exposed
to all signs of life and love, and you
the only one who matters to me now, I'd be less able
to touch your face and your lips than the face and the lips
of the first woman who came along.

I've dreamed of you so much, walked so much, spoken
and lain with your phantom that perhaps nothing more is left me
than to be a phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more
shadow
than the shadow that walks and will joyfully walk
on the sundial of your life.

... which reminds me that i wanted to share w/ her another poem, about the end of the world no less, but we can never find the time. i said to her once that there was never an end to the things we could talk about, only to the time we had to talk about them in. and so knowing she's an avid reader of these pages, i use this virtual space to make real time.

when we talk lately, though, it's never about anything that means something, mostly me being dramatic about never getting to see her, unwittingly helping her to forget what she ever saw in me. when we talk in dreams, my unconscious mind supplies all of the dialogue; what i love most about her is that the author of her conversation is someone i've never come across, in life or in fiction, someone i'd happily spend all my time w/.

in "if the world ends," fyfe too has a dream, and his former beloved is in it, more beautiful than ever. she doesn't speak, she merely plays along the doomed shore w/ buckets of sand, water running through her hands. he has faith in her power to transcend even the end of the world :

if the world ends,
it won't finish you.
you're not the type they can capture,
you flit like a flycatcher.
they can't pin you down.

the song builds slow, as many songs on through the window pane do, but it does build--sand castles in the air, at that, w/ corridors & passages filled w/ spectral humming. then the waves come in & tear the playhouse down--but what's left, well, it's even more beautiful than all that came before, and the end of the world seems like a small price to pay for a beginning so ripe w/ possibility.

it's been raining around these parts like ... well, like the end of the world was nigh. we had the other day what they call a supercell thunderstorm, something i'd never ever heard of before, but it was something to behold, for sure. today, however, leaving work, i looked at the clouds--and they never seemed more beautiful to me, and all of the brutish weather was worth it if only b/c it led to this. my friend, she recently came back home from a trip. looking again at that sky, i can only think that the clouds have arranged themselves in this way to please her; that having gotten to know her as she passed through, they wish to make her life as beautiful as possible.

the clouds & i, then.