11.26.2006

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."


- Courmac McCarthy
The Road

11.25.2006

It'll Soon Snow

The sun burned a cold white as it did all day from behind a layering of clouded sky that forced its rays upward as if to request attention to be painted. Yet, the Hudson River School and its Bierstadts would have required brushes divine to paint this solemn sky majestic. It was anything but, and I was everything but warm.

Unshielded from all four sides, I stood atop the Tenth Street Bridge hoping the numbness that already found my feet would overlook that I had hands and a nose. From this vantage, the upstream ripples were whitecaps on the Pacific viewed from a seven-seat Island Air commuter. This bridge railing–the hand of someone past held with fingers and knuckles just as white.

A barge would beneath pass to give scale to the waves and remind me this was just a river and I had a dinner to prepare. Besides, I could see clearly now that the trees have lost their camouflage. And I have some time since time seems to have slowed its pace, as it might when one flirts with love.












The crows swim the blue sky like an oil slick finding its way to the delta. They caw in place of song, scattering their lesser feathered friends from atop treetops and telephone wires. Most of the leaves are down and brown and brittle and settled densely in piles where breezes had come to rest. Red and grey squirrels rustle the piles, making noise resembling the frantic shakes of a rain stick, hoping their searches might produce enough stores to outlast the death of winter.

If you listen with your right ear to the cold earth, you'll smell sage, pine, earthworm. You'll feel the pinch against your cheek of orphaned acorn caps and white pine needles that have come to lay far from whence they grew. You'll spy with your left eye open, a London Plane tree crooked and arthritic and grey and bone white, set aglow in the late November sun.

With your left ear you'll hear the friction between rubber and concrete and the whine of break dust, the egoistic chatter between women with no jobs and five show dogs, the incessant questioning of youngsters with handfulls and pantsfulls of dried leaves, the half-barks and whimpers of dogs meeting and smelling each other for the first time, but no crows. For now, the crows are away.



11.12.2006

Train

The muted whistle of distant summer trains makes belief that I knew life at the turn of the century. Seemingly untouched by the magic wand of progress, its tracks still shine like oil soaked platinum. Years and wars are to it as palms would shrug ocean wrath.

Always present, the tracks mark, as track marks, soft landscapes hidden from view.

The majestic passing of its cars is half-enchantment, half-vacuum, and I am nervous for my lack of current pace and fragile momentum. I am nervous despite the polka-dotted ladybug topping my thumb, as warm air spits up dust and small stones and draws me forward.

11.08.2006

Pater-ism

The waterfall sound of mid-Autumn gusts, past the fragile weightless paper leaves, peaks and falls as light ignites the vibrant hues that so effortlessly muster our burdened spirit.

It is time for a reminder.

A circle-song that never ends is now repeating its chorus and reciting its vows with hope to always return again.