Hazy Purplish Tinge -- May I Have Your Autograph?

On the horizon bare trees
make distance
famous.

Note: This one's a bit obscure -- not really intended to have a title, but I felt like being explanatory. May as well say more: Sometimes a view makes distance real, like the opening up of dimensionality if one has been viewing with one eye for a long time, then opens the other as well. Also sometimes beauty strikes one unexpectedly, or strikes me that way (I get tired of "one" -- why not two or ten or a thousand? -- sometimes beauty strikes a thousand unexpectedly), and it's like meeting a celebrity in the street in one's (or one thousands' ) home town. I'm looking at the familiar -- trees across the Mississippi, an early winter day, cold enough to sting the nose with each breath, but no snow, little ice, the sky that thin blue with a few long, stretched-out clouds along the horizon, the branches of leafless trees blending in the distance to a rich brownish purple (what the alchemy of distance and air do to rumpled gray), and I can't look enough, feel I'm seeing something I've seen before, but not noticed. It's a "scene", something from a glossy magazine cover, but I'm not at Grand Canyon, just out for a walk in St. Paul, not a very big or picturesque city, hardly a hang-out for the jet set or for major stars like distance.

I've felt this way often. The first time (in this lifetime -- not counting when I was a baby) that I got to stroke a woman's breast -- Oh, yes, I wanted that autograph. So you're that famous boob I've been hearing so much about, looking at pictures of you on the sly, and here you are! And soon after, I met other famous body parts and felt I REALLY had something to write home about, except home (for the first time in a long time) felt like right here where I was.

We tell ourselves so many stories about ourselves that it's always a relief to realize, from time to time, that we are really here, and something is really happening. Wow! So this is what it's all about, all that stuff about being "in love" -- yeah, this is it! It really IS being in love. (Remember that one?)