The wind up, the tenor Gregorian chant wind chime is making its music (and I don’t hear the echoes from 1992 tonight, G.’s porch in Freeville, New York in the alcoholic madness and snow, soprano, alto, tenor and bass.) The temperature drops but only slightly, and I hear the horn of inbound (particle board, paper bags, pallets) Willamette & Pacific train. Car tires on Oak Creek Road, speedy, spinning, going home, going somewhere. How long, really, can this life we lead hold?
I also hear the frogs. One of the cats lounges on the lounge chair. Somewhere, half a world away, the streets are marble, slippery when wet. The light as it leaves turns blue, tinging, white-blue really, maybe Joni Mitchell would write a song about that. The wind where the Pace flag’s posted dies, is resurrected, dies again. I will never understand these eddies, these windy waves.
The yellow jacket trap sways—another eddy of wind?—and the light turns from blue to whitish yellow, I swear I’m going to see pale violet yet. The trees grown fifty feet taller since we arrived here, August 1998, are a silhouette against this freakish, warm night sky. The light from the lamp I left burning in the bedroom is amber and quiet, sends a message of solitary laced with nothing profound. The hair I’m growing—so I can pull it into a pony tail like those stylish Venetian women—blows in front of my face. I realize: I have no idea how to live, really, let alone how to end a poem.
I am out here in the night, increasing. More frogs, more tall tree silhouettes. It’s easier to see this screen on the laptop but I think I would give that up to have another person willing to try to remember what it’s like to have a single, authentic moment.
The public domain painting above is “Ville-d’Avray” by Camille Corot in 1870.
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