Friday, August 21, 2009

Kiss Me, I'm Falling

The red-eye's not made for sleeping, at least not when you arrive in NYC at 3 am Seattle time. In a daze I stumbled to the baggage claim, the air train, the Long Island Rail Road, the subway, and eventually found myself lying on my mom's couch with a phrase running through my head:

Kiss me, [something], I'm falling through darkness into [the world].

Nice phrase, isn't it? I had no idea where it came from, but as I lay there sleepily, I started playing a game with it, which was to replace the words in brackets with whatever came into my head. Like:

Kiss me, arugula, I'm falling through darkness into Long Island.
Kiss me, ordnance, I'm falling through darkness into green light.
Kiss me, nowhere, I'm falling through darkness into a taxi.

Fun, right? I recommend it for your insomnia. (The ones I was coming up with on the edge of sleep were better than these, of course, but I don't remember them.)

Partway through I remembered that it was a line from Theodore Roethke, which I now see that I got closer to right than I would have expected: "Kiss me, ashes, I'm falling through a dark swirl."

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