A Musing

A tribute to amuse a muse or muses, a museum, music, a musement, amusement. This is.

I sat on the cold gravel at the long end of a rainy day. No runner I, just a tired man with painful feet, likely to grow more pained with time as the physiotherapist had said.

The muses were goddesses, it is said, by descent if not by inclination. I have known many in my time. I take as their lowest common denominator the ability to inspire, no matter how briefly, no matter how fleetingly.

I have loved many in my time, and in fragments of my times. I have admired some while not loving them at all. And I have liked some, been made affectionate by some, been affected by others, and had my affect turned upside down by a few.

What indefinite and undefinable qualities of each encounter could lurk in crystal-cut vials or cut-crystal vials of tears, of perspiration, of inspiration, of laughter? I had a collection of such. But they did not exist, except in idea and not in rea, ideal and not real. Imagined.

You cannot grind the monoceros into a vial. You cannot place the dance in a capsule or the song in a pill. You can only dream them there, and then you must let them go.

Years later, I am still letting go, and yet they never leave me. They are part of my spiritual, my living, my natural, my vital. They are an incomplete sentence with dangling bits.

I got up and walked away from the cold gravel, my sandals crunching softly. My footsteps, I left behind.