Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Sappiness & Repetition

To smell the silence of a fragrant mid-springtime night from your window. The silence smells of spring, the night smells of silence. And your window is a window into all of that. It smells of novels, it smells of past, of all the things you had and were least yours. And the church bell in the dead of night, mixed with the same smell of past springs, of warm and fresh reading nights, almost magical, almost unreal - reminds you that you are not quite there and not quite then. You are somewhere else and somewhen else. But you can still dwell on memories you never knew were formed.
To smell the silence of the night.
To calmly rejoice.
To burst into quiet.
To listen to the echoing footsteps resounding down on the pavement of the echoing street below. The street bursting with silence. Bursting with night. Bursting with spring, and perfumes, and flowers from other trees on other streets. This street has no trees. Just tall, slender, bony streetlamps with light halos for heads.
Your window is now in the middle of the night, in the middle of silence, in the middle of spring. You can't blow out a streetlamp like you can blow out a candle.
To shut the window and go to sleep. And still smell the night and the spring underneath your eyelids.
The street lies down and sleeps at night.
The bell. A quarter past. A quarter past two.
A quarter past life.
Drei Viertel drei. Drei Viertel Tod.
But the night
and the smell
and the spring.
To burst out into life.
To burst with death.
But life!
But life!
But life!
To shut the window and sleep.
Echoes of smells.