White Snapdragons

A lyric essay on other lives and longing

White snapdragons cloud the air and I dream of other lives, relentless as a girl spinning a roulette wheel looking for redemption.

In a hundred corners bright chimes of spring have risen like bells, but at night the bed is fog and quiet. The only truth-telling is the moment before sleeping, and the one low moment after waking, when the soul hangs caught in mid-breath. Then the layers and layers of self-deception and distraction sweep in and cover up the truth about the self that stretches there waiting like a cat between sleep and waking.

The foundational setting of the soul as it lies pinned underneath the glass of reality is desperation. I would trade it all to be happy, or to be a knob that could be polished, a system that could be optimized. But the ways of being and of the soul are labyrinthine, and reality, stern teacher in a Dickens coat, knows us better than we know ourselves. The great roar of reality greets, with grim recognition, my soul, and each shake hands at that first light of waking. Then Reason, the main character of the 21st century, enters and throws over everything a half-false pall of Sanity. But desperation holds something true and so it has weight and mystery.

These half-lights and shadows are the architecture of my life, and I am caught in a web of longings. I read Dostoevsky, and Stoner, and plant flowers. Sometimes I observe, remote in a Bible study, the happiness of others. I go home, and take comfort in the lives I read of the quietly mad. Give me a Plath, or Clarissa’s tulips, or a wide beach for the mind.

Instead of running I buy art, and hang it like a collector. The color of my world is blue-green, and brown.

-C