Untitled #19

Autumn. A distant smile.
Laughter accompanied by
receding attention.
Rain patters through the
open window. Friends
depart, each looking into
the other’s eyes, searching
for glistening feelings. She
stifles a cry from the swirling
void within her heart.
The front door opens, and
I leave alone to embrace the wind,
decades ago. Cold rain patters onto
my face.

Television is not a provision

Something’s missing. It’s Saturday and I’m alone in my living room with my steamy ramen noodles. The cats are quietly hawking over me. There is the occasional slosh of passing cars, the click as the gas stove turns on to warm the hearth, and the faint sound of the sump-pump clearing our 19th-century basement of water. It is a lazy late afternoon characteristic of my weekends here back at home.

My parents went to visit relatives, and I am here with the mission of doing homework. However, I find my once-familiar environment disturbed somehow. I have been thinking about it every moment since I came back. We didn’t lose a family member or a pet, but rather a commodity.

The dark, reflective face of the television, sitting dead upon its stand, looms in the corner. The room is so quiet I find it unsettling and peaceful all at once. The television cable has been unplugged from the wall and the box removed. There are not even rabbit ears sticking up from behind its massive, bulky plastic shell.

In an effort to become more economically efficient we decided that our talking box was not worth over fifty dollars a month. I am used to having no television in my room on campus and being bogged down with work. According to my paranoid standards, TV watching would mean academic and social failure. On weekends I went home and breaks, though, there I was, enjoying shows like Battlestar Galactica and Mission Impossible. I even started watching Deal or No Deal.

I do not intend to criticize the good television shows out there right now. What I had a difficult time realizing was that even when I wasn’t cheering on my favorite characters on an episode of Battlestar Galactica, for example, someone else might be watching their show, and so on. The background noise was always there, and passively, through sight or sound, I have seen hundreds of episodes of Judge Judy, Judge Mathis, The People’s Court, and others. I have left the news on for three hours while only watching half an hour of it. I have heard thousands of commercials and remembered the advertising but not the source. It is a strange situation knowing what’s on TV, even though consciously you don’t think that you “watch” TV.

It feels like I have lost a family member, but one that was not necessarily well liked and valuable. While I lived for years without cable at all, the most recent portion of my life has been with the TV there by my side for every moment of it. The power it has to transmit images and alter the way one thinks is almost unrivaled. Creativity and imagination are stifled.

Last night, as tonight, I will sit here comfortable and warm in our room designed for “living” and not watching TV. The radio might be on low as I listen for news from the G20 summit in London taking place now; after, only the silence of an old house and thoughtful discussions which have been impeded by countless nights of TV-dinners and overwhelming volume using flashing lights and colors as our guide for family time. The house feels alive now, the sound of settling and its squeaky pine floors no longer muted by the box that teaches, talks, and intrudes.

Lapse Into Soul

The sun sets on
the silence of
another evening.

I see fingers of light
mingle through the
trees, I feel wind
freeze my beard.

The billowing
glow of stoves
and wood smoke
drifts on the breeze.

The moon peeks
through the wavering
clouds, cold, diffused.

People walk before
and behind me on
their way through
insubstantial space.

I stand in the middle
of space, now, the torrent
of blustery existence,
smiling for just a
moment at all the
world now around me,
harmony in complexity,
curiosity in simplicity.

Then, I am gone.

-hrafn

Meditating in the Attic

The room is quiet,
there is nothing here but
the silence of sacred candlelight,
the drafty air of an old New England
house, and that barely audible sound
in my ears when there is no other.
It is in this moment that
I can hear my beating heart,
feel the pulse of life within
my veins, wonder about all
those who have gone before me,
those who will go after;
within, without, they are all a part of me.
It is in this moment that I am alive.
Worry shimmers away into flames.
There is no need for merciful concern;
only peace is present here because
as I breathe, I nourish my soul,
and that is all that matters.

Huntress

She sat across the clean, white table,
spoke only with her quiet tones.
Her gaze wandered to his own,
watchful like the Tyrian huntress.

She was gathered in conversation
among strangers and smiles,
and gathered her resolve, just
close enough to hear his words.

The yearning moments galloped on.
She leaned so close behind him.
He spoke only with his eyes,
like the phantoms so near to her
in her dearest dreams.
He turned his head and
witnessed her with a crow’s compelling gaze.
She scribbled away at her notes,
embarrassed.

She sat a bit behind his family at lunch
and wondered if he could spot her this near.
He went for black coffee
and she wished for a moment shared between them,
with delicate sips, sighs, and laughter.

A day transpired into the winterly aether.
Together in a group of youths
swept into a deluge of adulthood,
he stood beside her beneath the eaves
of university, and smiled into the breeze.
Not a word was spoken. For that sunset alone,
an eddy swirled them side by side;
forces beyond the watch of nature wrapped them
together in the temporary tether of a fleeting moment,
where the huntress could wander dangerously through
her dreams and desires, unsure and unsatisfied,
and wonder about her friend becoming
distant then departed.

Under the sinking sun shouting crows
hung over the aging brick buildings and reaching red oaks.