A Sort of Cosmic Orgy

Pea soup thickens, the house grows quiet.

Second Saturday of February given to composing this love note to the anniversary of my death.

If I look up and a little right the steamed windows show faint blue behind a still-blossoming Christmas cactus.

My cold toes, my shoulders.

Traffic is dense near the exit where the hotel I worked at in 1987 is visible, a near-daily reminder of the only time I made out with a man, Luis from Columbia, whose mirror sunglasses folded in his breast pocket were what instructed me "not this."

Cumin, salt and smoked paprika.

If I lean a little right and narrow my eyes, the soup pot blurs and fingerprints become visible right below its handles, as if someone had deliberately refused to use them to heft the pot.

The Heath Fair on Sunday last August, the heat making us silly, the ox draw making me angry, which was hard to explain in that context.

What healing is contemplated by her visit, is brought forth or stifled by her obvious frustration with how the visit goes?

One confronts their inability to use a camera, wonders how it relates - or does it relate - to their ongoing infatuation with image to the exclusion of sustained narrative.

He does not write, he does not call and we do not forget him, ever.

The Man without Shoes is married to a woman who collects onion skins to dye loose cloth she will later use for patches on his tattered jeans.

Picking blueberries at dusk as a child, staying close to Dad because of the pistol he wore on his thigh.

Among the many things money measures, power.

Yet in the 1970s one glimpsed something that was a relic of the nineteenth century - and lacking at that age any understanding of how relics actually functioned - was able to enter (in a way that was to some extent irreversible, as most spells are) the deep past.

Stained coffee mugs on top of mostly-unused coffee mugs on the shelf below tea cups stacked on tea cups on the shelf below the shelf where all my thumbprint goblets and 1940s-era matching cordial glasses are kept.

Tra la.

Forces of nature against which we hurl ourselves, our own selves forces of nature, the whole experience a sort of cosmic orgy of intention, adaptation and confusion.

If I ended it, it is not ended: that, too, is a law.

Open-ended travel plans, open-minded travelers.