“My soul, embalmed in ink . . .” ~ Elton Glaser, from “Dirge in the Chalumeau Register”

“Moon Night” (before 1911?)
by Jan Sluyters

---

“One can sometimes
touch, in the distance between two people,
a moment of another person’s endless dream.” ~Yves Bonnefoy, from In the Shadow’s Light

Wednesday afternoon. Sunny and hot, 90 degrees. Too hot to think clearly.

“Sunrise” (1910, oil on canvas)
by Jan Sluyters

Too many thoughts to be cohesive:

• We wish for something so deeply only to have the reality of it be so disparate from our imaginings.
• We write songs in our heads about all of the things we lack, but the words never quite fit the melodies.
• My brain is replete with complex yearnings, yet I am unable to find a way in which to fill these chasms.
• What we are is so very different from who we are.
• Need is identified by the individual, leaving little room for insincere attempts to placate and pacify.

“We look up at the same stars, and see such different things.” ~ George R. R. Martin, from A Storm of Swords

“Morning Glory” (1909, oil on canvas)
by Jan Sluyters

I continually find scraps of paper with snatches of words and phrases, but no context, so I don’t know what they mean, much like life.

• So many weeks of being alone and lonely and having no idea as to how to ameliorate the sadness only to have the sadness become a permanent attendant.
• Loneliness is ephemeral, yet incongruously, it can seep into the edges of moments in which we are not alone.
• We traverse the deserts of our lives, travel these landscapes looking for the familiar, the taste of water on our dry lips.
• The heart is a self-fulfilling prophet of despair.
• When talking becomes too tangled, the only victor is silence.

“I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.” ~ Edward Thomas, from “Lights Out”

“Full Moon on the Water” (1912, oil on canvas)
by Jan Sluyters

I grow weary of the open-ended nature of life, would that it could be seen in advance.

• How can two people stand side-by-side beneath the same night sky and be unable to share the same brief snatches of beauty?
• Horizons become limited by our myopic views of life, death, and love.
• Love is a word heavy with deceit, laden with misinterpretation.
• I had believed that my viewpoint had merit in your eyes, mistakenly so, it seems.
• The veins beneath the skin, the heart’s steady beat, a map to what we are—yet so many of the blue lines are false horizons.
• I do not understand this reality—its labyrinthine truth is too twisted to discern.

“Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity.” ~ Georges Bataille, from Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Landscape by Moonlight II” (1911, oil on canvas)
by Jan Sluyters

I am so tired, weary to the bone, and I do not harbor enough energy to bridge this gulf.

• The joy of life lies hidden too deeply to be found most days.
• There is no corner large enough to hide me, even when I am this small.
• Oh how I long for earnest conversation, the honest camaraderie that once was.
• We all hide our selves from the light, no matter how much we may deny it, because darkness is so much easier to enfold.
• True north is impossible to pinpoint when two people come to it from such different points on the compass.

“I do not know whether to be joy-white with my spirit
Or rent-gray with the blown remnants of my mind.” ~ Maxwell Bodenheim, from A Man to a Dead Woman”

“Forest Trail” (1910, oil on canvas)
by Jan Sluyters

I failed to notice that I and my opinions had become irrelevant, much to my own chagrin.

• Longing is the most pregnant of two-syllable words, followed only by heartache, so intricate are their definitions.
• Betrayal is a complicated word, one most people are unable to identify as betrayal is like smoke—dense at first, transparent later.
• The weight of words drags us down to the silty bottom, yet it is only through words that we will be able to float above the water line once more.
• The translucent nature of my need offers you a map easy enough to follow to my heart, yet you spit upon my fire.
• Silence of the heart comes from suffering of the soul, and neither are easily repaired.
• Apology is a word heavy with incomprehensible implications.

All images are by Dutch artist, Jan Sluyters (1881-1957).

Music by Night Beds, “Even if We Try”

                   

Bioluminescence

1. Candela

The eggs burn softly
in the earth, and when glow worms
hatch out, ravenous, each one comes with a tiny
bright square of light like the view-hole to a
furnace notched in its belly.
Can you feel their heat? Their hunger for the tender
moonstruck flesh of slugs and snails?

1. Lambert

Sometimes at night, fire
flies are startled by lightning,
the tympani-drum flutter of thunder rumbling the storm
home, and they all flash at once in surprise—a quick
blinking open of sleepy
green nocturnal eyes, a phosphorescent murmur:
Go back to sleep. It’s just rain

1. Lumen

How vulnerable
we would all be if longing
shone through our bodies, if our skins were translucent
lanterns flushed with yellow flame leaping in the strange
and unpredictable winds
of our desire, like the neon Morse code fireflies
use to brazenly flick the night.

1. Luciferin

You are a dusky
angel drawn to the gleaming
beam of my porch light, a brief embered orange blaze
from your cigarette, sizzle of sparks splattering
the asphalt of my sidewalk.
Your touch like sooty moth wings, and I glow, suffused
with your heat, your scent, your light.

~ Lee Ann Roripaugh