I feel a leaf adrift again today. We’ll find a twig to stick to in the stream, accumulate some blurry river sediment.
Smith is quiet and remote and tired. I give him some privacy today on the train. I rarely look at him on the seat next to me.
The train effects a rushed brushed painting until I fix on a spill of soil and observe granularity, clarity. The specific color palette between Barcelona and Madrid is olive green, green green, gunmetal cloud, mesa red. Boulders are monuments or teeth on hills. Planned orthogonal forests reach up with white trunks and spring green leafs.
It’s a Salvador Dali sky. Plateaus of clouds, mesas. Long shadows cast by blunt bushes, corn rowed zen garden rakings. Isolated train towns in the vertices of denuded hills. I’m reminded of Michael Salinger’s poem about driving West. He speaks of metronome phone towers, the weave of field around a single burled tree.
The fields follow the warp and weave of the land, irregular outlines.
I remember that I’ve forgotten something profound. I had a glimpse into an insight about myself but I didn’t write it down. I thought it would be absorbed into the well of myself for later draw. But then the topology changed.
I must research the history of land development in Spain. Maybe this is not lost, remembered.
A woman sits in front of me, scanning something on her lap. It’s a textbook which she has printed. Across the aisle a boy lays three cell phones on the foldout table in front of him, in modern techno ecstasy.
Every language seems familiar.
It is not trivial to be here. But the train makes it seem so. I sit in private astonishment. I think, Outside is where it matters. Then all I need are four walls.
The train speeds on through its movie, landscape is butter through hot knife.
The cell phone boy gets a call. His hand sports a heart tattoo.
My sight peels an airplane from the sky, like a small glinty lice.
The boy plays his headphones too loud in the last half hour to Madrid, imposing his cool on my ear space.
My last thoughts before Madrid: I could just look at things and be awake, write what I think. To maintain responsibility through distance is a tenuous link. A desert is a beautiful and vast and worthless woman. Revealed meaning makes life hard work.