2020

Perhaps a dark shape materializes in the middle of an iced road. It’s too late, too slick, to stop—when the animal turns to kiss the headlights. Everything slow and muted in the storm, the animal levitating now and passing through glass, an apparition. It nestles neatly into our laps, we the passengers, whose mouths, open and cavernous, are now the ghostly ones—white-faced and wailing. We pull off the road, and the hazards blink as something reaches through…

Maybe autumn has gone, but spring has not yet come. The branches of the trees lay bare, without buds, in the cold air full of sunshine. The light of the day arises, shines forth in splendor, and fades away so the moon and stars can enter through the window. At times we fall silent, take some bread from a cupboard, and share it. This bread really has the taste of bread. I have never found this taste again. Yet how am I to know if I remember rightly?  

No Color (for Tess)

Perhaps the sun is not yellow. Most of the time daylight has no color at all. What if the sun is really a hole in the sky, and that is why we should never look directly at it? What if the sun is really the color of everything we wish we could have simply forgotten...or perhaps it's the color of a crowd of parents and children coming to our rescue.

Maybe yellow is the color of all things round and whole and dying like the sun that possess a certain sadness. Maybe it's a loose ball rolling out into the street tempting a young child to follow it, or the improved grip and spin of brand-new skateboard wheels. One of her sisters hated the color yellow, the nicotine stains between her fingers, the fields of dry grasses at the end of summer. Maybe yellow is a kind of dreaming without knowing that populates night after night of unsatisfying sleep, so scattered and shallow.

The World is Quieter Now

Perhaps in these late last days we spend much of our time in bed but like mountain climbers in a nightmare we can never reach sleep, for it is the untiming of time that is our project. We work on lifting ticks from the clock and freezing them the way that furniture and light are frozen in time in some of our favorite paintings.

Maybe just as experienced firefighters take pause to hear the faintest crackle or pop that will signal the flames' approach, we quietly await the finale we know is destined to come. Our bags are packed to overflowing, yet so much remains on shelves and in closets. Evacuation orders accumulate on the lock screens of our phones foretelling another night of sprinklers on the roof. We climb towards sleep accompanied by a song that sounds a lot like falling rain, but isn't.