incandescens | cold and grey

The weather... well, I would like to say that it is miserable and getting more so, but that would probably be exaggerating a bit. So I will just say that it is miserable, and cold, and wet, and grey, and that I am currently wrapped up in one of the thicker shawls that I've knitted (in Noro Silk Mountain, for the record), and feeling somewhere between smug that it is useful and beautiful, and depressed that it should be needed in June.

Cheered myself up a bit by playing the recently acquired Persona 2: Innocent Sin on my PSP. (I understand there is also a Japanese port out of the sequel, Eternal Punishment, but that it hasn't been brought over in an English translation yet. I can but cross my fingers.) Nothing like thwarting the will of Nyarlathotep for a heroic but doomed endeavour.

I'll get back to trying to defeat Belial in Diablo 3 tomorrow, maybe.

And do some writing.

When I have more energy and am not so tired. Everyone's tired. Coworker was complaining that it didn't feel as if her cold from a couple of weeks ago had really gone away. I was saying the same thing. Weekend, come quickly, even if it has been a very short week. We need you.

---

Summer 1961

This poem, written a few weeks before her death, is dedicated to the memory of H.D.

This is the year when the old ones,
the old great ones,
leave us alone on the road.

The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones

have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving away over a hill
off to one side.

They are not dying,
they are withdrawn
into a painful privacy

learning to live without words.
E.P., 'it looks like dying' - Williams: 'I can't
describe to you what has been

happening to me' -
H.D. 'unable to speak'.
The darkness

twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.

They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given

the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck

has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
One can't reach

the sea on this endless
road to the sea unless
one turns aside at the end, it seems,

follows
the owl that silently glides above it
aslant, back and forth,

and away into deep woods.

But for us the road
unfurls itself, we count the
words in our pockets, we wonder

how it will be without them, we don't
stop walking, we know
there is far to go, sometimes

we think the night wind carries
a smell of the sea . . .

-- Denise Levertov