Her Mild Delirium

This is a Friends Only journal. If I don't know you well, I will likely not add you. If you are a charismatic stranger in no danger of ruining my life, sure - I'll add you. If I love you, comment and I will add you.

Xoxo

It is hard to pull together all the details of a human.

I think it is particularly difficult now, with the necessity of having an image – a cultivated self online. It seems as though we have all become so impatient that we cannot fathom having more details than “what do you do?” or “where do you live?” Even our pastimes must be fashionable and on point.

So, while I spent the last hour culling posts and images in order to project a “professional” image online, I must ask myself what cost I pay for it. I am loathe to admit the demand that we compartmentalize ourselves in this way. I think this might be why checking in at a bar or taking risque selfies is so taboo when we’re laid bare this way.

Here you go – have all of me.

( Ophelia )

OPHELIA

I.

Where stars sleep on the calm, black water, pale
Ophelia, like a giant lily, floats,
Floats very slowly, spread on her long veil . . .
—The horn, in deep woods, sounds its final notes.

Some thousand years have passed, and drearisome
Ophelia, white ghost, threads the long, black stream.
Some thousand years her mild delirium
Has sighed to evening's breeze its tender theme.

Winds kiss her breasts and splay her veils to make
A flaring wreath, rocked gently by the flow;
Above her shoulder, willows weep and shake,
And bowed reeds arch the wide, rapt brow below.

Crimped lily pads sigh there; there alders rest;
But sometimes, when she wakes a sleeping tree,
A little stir of wings escapes some nest.
—Gold stars let fall their eerie melody.

II.

O pale Ophelia! Beautiful as snow!
You died, child, taken by the river—true.
—Down Norway's towering mountains such winds blow
As whispered that fierce liberty to you;

The breath of wind that twisted your great mane
Bore those strange rumblings to your dreaming mind;
Your heart heard Nature singing its refrain
Whenever night sighed or the arbor whined;

Your child's heart, too naïve, too mild, gave way,
Dashed by a vast groan, voice of the mad seas;
And that pale, handsome prince one April day
Sat speechless, a poor madman, at your knees!

Heaven! Love! Freedom! You poor, crazed, dreaming
thing!
—Dissolved by him as snow by fire, your plea
Throttled by all your grand imagining,
Your blue eye stunned by dread Infinity!

III.

—And Poets say that nights you search the pale
Starlight for flowers you plucked once—that they spy
On the stream, sometimes, spread on her long veil,
Ophelia, like a lily floating by.

-Arthur Rimbaud