11/23/00: A Careful Breathing

Okay, so this isn't brilliant. I wrote it when I was about 17, so have a little mercy. I'm kind of fond of it, though, so I'm putting it here. It's really hard to get these fragmentary memories into word form. I don't know if I could do much better even now, when (I hope) I've gotten a bit better at writing. Who knows.

A careful breathing

In nursery school, at naptime,
in the summertime.

Every day we'd lie in our cots,
forced to be asleep,
always leaving me alone,
Awake in a room full of sleepers,
Tired, but not sleepy.

And the fan blew back and forth, sentient, aware,

its fan . . . . . . . . . . head
on its fan . . . . neck and body

(like the bust of a famous fan)

blowing air over the sleepers,
and over me.

There were these moments of light and dark,
and now I know that they were the clouds shifting
back . . . . . . and . . . . . forth
in front of the sun, but
back then it seemed
a careful breathing
of the air in the room.

Now in comes the air,
The light shifts up high,
As the fan blows this way, . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now out goes the air,
And the sleepers breathe in. . . . . . . . . .. . . The light shifts down low,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . as the fan blows that way,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and the sleepers breathe out.

But I am on a different schedule,
breathing in as the
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . light goes down
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and out
as the light goes up,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . so I'm
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . not
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . getting
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . enough
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . light.

more musings.. come on, you don't have anything better to do. :)