& ones you wish you had
by uzwi
Twelve minutes past six it rains once, very quickly & heavily; but the garden bench is left dry except for the horizontal slats, which, slicked & mirrored, reflect the clouds. The whole garden is in light again. It’s a grey light. The garden wall, swagged with ivy and clematis, bowed under the weight of them & of the quince, looks like a tranquil graveyard just after rain. You’re being shown something. The thunder–which passes quickly into the distance, where it stays–is telling you something about what was never here, the gap you were already trying to fill. The light, decades old, issued from another garden. It spent many years arriving here with its meaningless postcard message, “Wish I was there.” In a minute you won’t even be the person who received it. The thunder will crawl off east, people will start coming home from work, or going away for the weekend. They’ll slam car doors.
This is lovely.
A pedant writes: Is the light metaphorical entirely? Because, if not coming from the Sun, why decades old? From which star? Is it six in the morning or the evening? What time of year?
Otherwise, it’s the most wonderful description of our garden this evening, except no quince, just the pears, and the hens screeching with complaint.
Oh, entirely metaphorical I’d say. The light cast forward by what is now a memory, arriving here too late, so that every grammar you can use to describe it falls to pieces under the strain. A failed foreshadowing (or fore-illuminating). God gave us metaphor for times like that. The instructions scribbled on the box read, “I mean, it might be of some use, just see what you can do with it.”
Wonderful. And the helpful instructions-Too funny. 🙂
I succumb to defeat when trying to use wordage for luminance. I retreat into the world of paint where I have labored for several decades to do the most simple luminary metaphor. I did do a painting once and called it: Simple Lights Years
tell me Uncle Z–what does God’s scribble look like?
whoops–that’s: Simple Light Years
Hi Mia.
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s notebook, if he had one.
“Twelve minutes past six …” Fine stuff, Mike. A lot of summer days in my childhood seemed to end that way: light from another garden indeed.
Many years ago when I was but a callow twenty-thing I conceived the idea of a novel told from the point of view of a protagonist who was the member of a tribe or subculture able to see in the ultraviolet and infrared ends of the spectrum. It was to be an investigation between the connection between senses and culture.
I failed utterly to find a vocabulary capable of illuminating the reader and rendering the life of such a being accessible. Formulaic colour descriptions become tedious. Excessive metaphor becomes irritating, even if the implications of such an existence were interesting. Thermal sensing does wonders for meteorological and emotional perception. There might be some mileage in entwining these two..mm…
Sigh. One day, I’ll go back for another go. For now the right approach remains opaque to me.
[…] times like this, passages like these makes me want to weep with joy, frustration, and something else I can’t quite […]