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Sentimental

I can see the stars come in my room
while your loving attitude
is like a flame that lights the room.
On the wings of every kiss
drifts a melody so soft and sweet.
In this sentimental bliss
you make my paradise complete!
Rose petals seem to fall
it's all like a dream
to call you mine...
My heart's a lighter thing
since you've made this night
a thing divine!
In a Sentimental Mood,
I'm within a world so heavenly
for I never dreamt that you'd
be loving sentimental me!
Duke Ellington

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Expansion

I once knew a woman that was not like any other. She was very close, but I never could hold her, and I still miss her. Maybe I could call her mother nature, but that would be a diminishment of what she is. Yes, I suppose you could call it a one night stand. I swear no drugs were involved. I just get like this sometimes. It helps to relax.

It was a perfect night for relaxing. A mild spring night, no distractions, and feeling calm, my senses are magnified. The world enjoins with me as my self dissolves.

The black sky breaks open; as they fall, I can see the the stars come in my room. A cool breeze blows through my soul, ruffling the white curtains of my window. My surfaces are shallow, my bones insubstantial. My lumpen life is soil to her rain; air to her rainbow.

I feel her presence coalesce as dust motes sparkling in the starlight and thenÉ the smell of roses, of earth, of life. She gently becomes manifest. She walks on moonbeams. She is a vision of glory and subtlety, and she holds my being in her hands. I am a dot on her line, a line on her plane, a field on her manifold. I feel the warm comfort of her cradle like a bed of dried leaves in autumn sunlight. Her love is exquisite, a paradise completed.

Her loving attitude is like a flame that lights the room and enlightens me. I cannot care for myself anymore, as all becomes one and all is under her compassion. My own compassion extends out: -to the deep blue ocean and the golden fields, to the confused and the stead, to the part and the whole.

Her voice is a melody soft and sweet; its tune holds my world together. It is a tune full of fine detail: the background hum of particle creation and the heartbeat of caesium, the rhythms of the light held in the last sunset on earth and in a glass of wine drunk last night by the candle. It adds time to pi; shows how a circle can go other than around, and makes my own heart's song trivial by comparison.

While she may hold me, I cannot hold her. She is a zeitgeist: the encapsulation of a time, a moment, a fleeting feeling, an aspect only of the universe. How can one hold a moment? How can one live a feeling?

Sometimes I feel her near, when the gloss on glass slips silver, when I catch the starlight reflecting on my tears.