Spirits in the Night, Part 2.
The wind is alive. It has to be. You can see it in the sideways rain and supernatural trash.
There’s a frazzled pine tree across the street, a friend of the wind that’s desperately trying to get through to me.
I don’t speak tree. And there’s fear in the misunderstanding. Maybe the pine can see over the colonial steeples, a fire at the cigarette-stained Super 8 across town. Maybe the roots are sensing a shift in tectonic plates, the tsunamis off the Hudson! Perhaps it knows of an impending humanity-ending, brain-eating parasite. Or it could be that the tree is telling me I’ve got it all wrong with my hobo songs.
Whatever it’s saying, I can’t look away. I may only be an extra, but I take my part seriously and stare straight into the arms of the tree, straight through to the film.
“Someone to whom I recently showed my glass beehive, with its movement like the main gear wheel of a clock…Someone who saw the constant agitation of the honeycomb, the mysterious maddened commotion of the nurse bees over the nests, the teeming bridges and stairways of wax, the invading spirals of the queen, the endlessly varied and repetitive labors of the swarm, the relentless yet ineffectual toil, the fevered comings and goings, the call to sleep always ignored, undermining the next day’s work, the final repose of death far from a place that tolerates neither sickness nor tombs…Someone who observed these things after the initial astonishment had passed, quickly looked away with an expression of indescribable sadness and horror.” Fernando from The Spirit of the Beehive
From a dimly lit room in Kingston, New York, I humbly say don’t look away. Even if it’s all pointless, our existence is some seriously magnificent pointlessness to behold.
Sure, the days keep squaring off through ordinary cycles, the size of my popsicle-stick words framed against a torrential cosmos, pacing the tight perimeter of a brick home exactly three miles west of Kingston Point.
I was a fool to believe the promise of February’s drunken warm breeze. Winter doesn’t relinquish in a day. But under the bark, I know we all know it — there is a buzz. Spring is resolute in its eventual return.
(Cue hobo songs.)