underneath

 ©
underneath
on the underside
where no one ever looks
is so much more
than anyone will ever know
love joy beauty hate
pain pleasure happiness

hidden love
hidden hate
hidden beauty

but no one ever looks
no one sees me
am I real if unseen?
is there anything to see?


©
this reminds me of some very bad poetry my mom wrote, probably when she was about the age I am now. I turn 62 in a few days.

I have not spent my actual birthday with anyone since Rosie left me.  I have years in which I have been more social and I ask friends to celebrate my birthday over coffee, tea or a walk. Maybe lunch.  I never see anyone on my actual birthday.

I spend my birthday trying to close the endless, gaping hole in my being where Rosie used to be, where I believed someone loved me.

The French artist Rene Magritte painted surrealist paintings.  I just remembered one in which the viewer sees a long, narrow wharf, lined with tiny shacks. Outside each shack, sits a mermaid, dressed in a dress with her tale tucked alongside her chair. Mermaids waiting. Hmmm. I believe that painting is in the Chicago Art Institute's collection, for I have seen it many times and I have been to that museum more than any other.

The Magritte painting that first came to mind as I mope in self sorrow is a piece called 'Time Transfixed". It is a realistic painting of a fireplace, a mantel, a mirror above the mantle. I don't remember if there is a fire. Bursting through the painting, maybe through the bricks just below the mantle, is a steam engine train. The artist painted well so as the viewer sees the painting, the viewer, at least this viewer, has a sense of the speed of the train, the power of the train, bursting through time and space into such unexpected arrival. 

I had a poster of Time Transfixed on my college dorm wall throughout college.  I often stared at that steam engine, its white steam trailing back towards the fireplace, which was only a few inches of trail.  I tried to imagine what the artist 'saw' that moved him to paint surrealist paintings. I tried to imagine time being mutuable, transfixed, or changed from my understanding of time. Time is relative, of course, but how?

I would also, often, muddle my reflections of that steam engine breaking into the presumed living room in which the fireplace with mantel sat with memories of all those mermaids, waiting for their men to come home from the sea. That's what I imagined that mermaids were doing. Waiting for men to come home from the sea. The mermaids all wore identical dresses, pale blue dresses with thin black stripes spaced so the dresses appeared more blue than anything else but the faint black pinstripes were there. From the bottom of the dress to the mermaids' chains, was a row a teeny, tiny black buttons. Below the end of the skirt, the viewer had a glimpse of petticoats.

I wondered, and still do, why the women were dressed so primly. Why had mermaids adopted the standard of clothing? And why such prim clothing? And what were they waiting for?

What were they waiting for?

What am I waiting for?

Do it. Begin it now, my dear.

How?  What I want is to be with someone. I can't make that happen unilaterally.

Underneath, within me, in lands just as real as the living room in Magritte's Time Transfixed, I stand frozen, transfixed. In motion but not in motion. Moving forward but struggling to breath.

Hidden love. Hidden joy. Hidden beauty. Hidden greatness. But no one knows. I barely know.