Sunday 29 June 2008

summer evening




I was lying on my dark blue sofa, a book forgotten on my side or perhaps none, I couldn't tell any longer. The room was full of flowers, the whole week strangers had been offering me flowers everywhere I went, I had accepted them shyly in the beginning but then I had got accustomed to it, every time I was on the street and an unknown face suddenly appeared beside me, I spontaneously reached out for the bouquet.

The room was full of flowers, mostly roses, white and red, imperial lilies, fresh and moist. My skin was glowing, the window wide-open, my shoulder thin and wounded before the tired evening wind. In that special quality of the air one might have called 'light' if words hadn't already turned into golden pollen, the objects seemed to float around me and I, breathing, I, alive and strangely replenished with dreams, was suddenly the shadow they cast on memory. And then a petal fell. Somewhere in the room, I couldn't tell which vase out of the myriads I had been growing around me in their warm clay, a heavy petal fell, a rustle went through the leaves, the silence broke.

I startled as if in sleep, I shuddered, as if someone had been there, watching me all the time.

8 comments:

  1. Are those your words, or are you quoting somebody?

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  2. if I quote somebody, I always mention it. or if I use somebody's else pictures. why? :-)

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  3. no doubt the nearest a human can get to the inner life of flowers --- so suggestive & sensuous a text (my nose is twitching ; the noise of a fallen petal still resounding in my head)

    'words turned into golden pollen': beautiful expression, very fertile too! :-)

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  4. zuma: so cryptic! is this your way to tell me that I am not very creative? :-)

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  5. ffflaneur: maybe I was thinking about how a deaf mute would have heard that petal fall, if suddenly awaken to the world of sounds - or maybe a dead mute? hmm :-P
    btw, they do have glamorous tea bowls also :-)

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  6. haha...my reputation for sarcasm precedes me! no no i wasn't alluding to any lack of creativity (quite on the contrary, actually). and neither did i recognize any similarity with anything I consciously remember reading...it was a classic deja vu - a vague and fleeting feeling of familiarity; it was not just the paragraph that was familiar but the entire act of readng it and imagery it conjured...i remembered the mood, not just the text. Which of course is impossible.
    Whether it subconsciously reminded me of something else, perhaps a similar imagery or turn of phrase; or even just the mood - I do not know - who knows what forgotten junk floats around in the turgid grays of my brain... I wouldn't go there...there be dragons... Neway, who can tell how and why a deja vu comes about? unless you believe in the matrix...

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  7. zuma: ha, yes, of course, your reputation is already well-known so I have to be always on my guard :-)
    but now I am relieved :-) and thankful for your words. and yes, I actually thought of the matrix myself when you wrote "deja-vu" :-)

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