It’s there in the clutter, dust and thoughts and unsettled books, memento and fetish and the foolish all but forgotten. The surface tension of this fixed focus, the tangle of mind and meaning, this restless sieve of ash and ember. Maybe it’s somewhere in a notebook from twenty years ago, maybe it’s in the marginalia where there used to be receipts. The same books and boxes dragged down the decades, the slow circle and the latest last tango. Like going downstairs into my grandparents’ basement, the narrow decent into darkness, something waiting for me leaving with a flick of a switch. Not the root beer waiting in cold brown bottles, not the sense of something rushing in the skin of the shadows, but knowing now I was watching me from that darkness. The tear in all the time between us, the same stirring as the notion unfolds.
Absently I lick my lips, back in the dry wind and old bones. The travel more a stitch in something than a sojourn, a hole closed between breath and being, a circuit at last set. The ragged clothes, the tattered flesh, this knot of consequence and conceit. The song I get to singing the song I always hear depending on the vacancies. It’s a one way road but you live in all directions. Ripped along the resonance and humming from the hollow, the husk always the sound of the wind and ocean, a chorus of animals between the sky and the shore. Aching to the bone, hungry for anything but what’s on my plate, the vivid green tousled by the ceaseless breeze. The taste of smoke and salt, a sea of senses in every descent.
I count the dead in funerals I never attended, I count the dead in the graves I’ve never seen. A few surprises and bolts from the blue, but mostly the stumble into the word that gets around or the startle of planning a visit. The neglected friendships that passed their expiration dates and the loves gone like the letters they burned, the people in the past tense and the ones that put me there. Old and broke and sick as you’d expect, holding onto the architecture and the archetype, belly both ache and pain. I do nothing but dissolve into earth and atmosphere, and I do it every day. Words that drizzle through the wounds in the world we make into our own. A trail of smoke left on the shelf, a direction sealed in traveling light.