Full of What Must Die

I wake up earlier than usual, dress and walk up Main Street to Plainfield Road, going where it is darkest. Chapels abound, a lesson I forgot and remembered with considerable effort. Running into your therapist years later, both of you happy, keeping it simple and inside bounds that seem to be to be transgressed. A thing for gamblers’ daughters in my early twenties, a theme that helped me organize my ongoing living in relationship.

Rain begins a little after midnight. It’s true the moon is only there when you look at it but why does this matter? We who are exhausted by clowns, doctors and poets. Funerals at the nearby church, people parking everywhere.

It was raining when we left the theatre – that tiny basement on Pleasant Street, now gone, in which we watched Little Buddha with seven other souls – and Chrisoula hummed Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head, happy and clear, carrying me along to the next step our lives together made possible. Letting thoughts come and go, easiest thing in the world. Dead goldenrod leaning into the road where we walk, a hushing sound as we brush it passing, a sorrow somewhere that we have not yet reckoned with.

Remember reading Moby Dick for the first time, remembering reading The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Strangers at whom we smile, strangers in whose presence we feel an almost unbearable happiness. This is not an argument!

Certain men, certain ways. That which ends up other than you expect. I guess I’ll go the way of circumstance, same as when I was twenty-three and couldn’t stop smiling, unsure what else was called for. Denise if you are reading this say hi.

That half-finished house on Route Nine I hear the mortgage fell through on, its roof beams oddly beautiful – symmetrical, linear – in the dawn when I drive past, slowing to admire what can only be defined as a failure. Owls signaling unto darkness their intention to hunt, then sailing forth in waning moonlight, the landscape surrounding them vast and full of what must die so others can live.