Hilton Head Island: Saturday evening and some poems

 

I am sitting on the deck around sunset after a day of rain.

I don’t believe that the above distorted panorama taken with my iPhone fully expresses the beauty I am experiencing.  Skull Creek is glistening silver in the dying light and as I glance up two egrets are flying between the shore and the marina, left to right.

A slight breeze.  A pleasant temperature.

I cherish these moments.  I cherish this unexpected beauty.  I never imagined I would enjoy living in a marsh.

Carol has retired to the bedroom to read.

I came out here and was watching a video of Julio Inglesis “El Amor’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

I am still filled with passion.  Perhaps unseemly at my age.  For women and for life.

Of women, they became singular when I met Carol thirty years ago.  I admire the beauty of the young without envy or regret for I had my time with them decades ago and do not want more.

But, and not unrelated, I think about despair, of which I have known much, some with women, and still do.  That might be surprising.  I have done much with words and wind and women, but…And I pause at the ‘but’.  Perhaps it is just as I have written:  joy does not need explanation.  It is its own justification.  But we wish our suffering had meaning and I don’t know that mine does.

Artists have made careers conveying their despair to others.  That is appropriate for they are expressing an almost universal human experience.  I have in some of my earlier writings expressed despair myself.  But with time I have learned that the greatest strength is to absorb the evil that has been done to you without passing it on.  A Christian virtue not historically often practiced by Christians, of which I am not one.  And as an artist to keep my despair to myself.  Everyone already has enough of his or her own.  They don’t need mine.  And to offer as much hope as I honestly can.  

I do not claim any rational justification to be on the side of hope rather than despair.  I just would rather be.  Probably, as most is, a quirk of what I got from the genetic lottery.

So I sit here immersed in beauty and know that perhaps experience of beauty ought to be enough, but for me it isn’t.  

I have lived far longer than I ever expected, yet I confess at eighty-two I live in hope that I will last until I am eighty-five and embark on another voyage beyond the edge.  Somehow for me moving toward that gives meaning to all the rest.

An old man with hopes and plans is truly egregious, but then I always was.  In the root meaning of the word.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/egregious-word-history-and-meaning#:~:text=The%20Latin%20word%20grex%20means,Latin%20%E2%80%94%20something%20that%20stands%20apart.

As I have been writing the sun has lowered beyond Pickney Island and the colors of sky and water have become more intense.

I raise my empty glass:  To making whatever you can of our butteryfly’s cough of life.

Emily Dickinson  1830-1886

Xu Zenquing 1479-1511

William Shakespeare  1564-1616