Thursday, November 24, 2011

A Flute Playing And Fog Hides The Shore






Lost in the fog
There’s a shape
I can barely see
But it sees me



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“So what’s the deal with you and flutes?” she asked.

He said, “If a woman is blowing into a flute, she can’t be asking me dumb questions.”

“Shut up!” she said, laughing.


*


He said, “I’ve been a few dozen yards off shore in a small boat on a Wisconsin lake. Fog comes in and the shore becomes invisible. Could be any distance away. I’ve been a couple of miles off shore from some coastline blue water cruising in a sailboat. Fog comes in and the shore becomes invisible. Could be any distance away. The size of the body of water doesn’t change the effect the fog has on a person trying to see the shore. People see monsters in Loch Ness, and people see monsters in lots of other lakes. Some of the lakes people see monsters in are too small to imagine any kind of large animal living in them. But if monsters are something like fog—something that gets between us and something else, something that we see because we see it set off against something else—then the size of the body of water wouldn’t matter at all.”

She said, “You think monsters are like fog? Something like weather?”

He said, “I’m not saying monsters aren’t living things. Whatever they are. But I’m not sure we’ll ever see monsters if we go out looking for them. If we see them because they get between us and something else, then we’ll only see monsters when we’re trying to look at something else.”

She asked, “Have you ever seen a monster?”

He said, “I’ve never seen, you know, something like a bigfoot hairy ape or a sea monster plesiosaur. But I’ve been looking at something and then somehow realized that I was seeing something completely different from what I thought I was looking at. I’m not sure monsters always look like monsters.”

She asked, “How far away is Los Angeles from Loch Ness?”

He said, “About five thousand miles. As the crow flies.”

She said, “Of course, a monster crow could fly that distance in no time at all.”

He kissed her.

























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