Bathing

Once

I was taking a bath in the arts.

I wallowed in music--opera, folk, moody, soggy blues--dipped into the fluid emotions of a vivid alternative sound. I rolled in the glory of Impressionism's wake, and in the followers and rebels of all her daughters. I drank Keats, I slurped Wodehouse, I gulped a great mouthfuls of Shakespearian commentary.

I scrubbed my arms with a soupcon of post-war New Age abstracts and sudsed my thighs with the pseudo-poetry that was shaken and pieced together into frothy 50s hopelessness.

I was making myself clean, I thought, with the rough surfaces of the philosophy living on the bottom of these bottomless lakes

Until--one day--I noticed

It:

That not every truth is equal.

That beauty does not equate with honesty

And abruptness is not synonymous with transparency

That the most open-armed (and highest) kites are still capable of self-deception.

I stood up quickly; the moist beauty slid off of me in rivulets

And when I turned around and knelt to look...

I could see them. They still shouted to me in chorus.

I stirred them around with a finger

and began

to ask them questions about themselves.

I pulled the answers out, dripping

and set them on a scale.