The Ephemeral World Then, 7:57 on the Clock, Prose Poems for Lost Souls
one
the wild summer sun and the countenance of the earth
the two men in Orlando were talking about baseball, and thinking of it, the two men in Nevada were talking about hockey. the first two spoke of spring training and the second two of drafts and players old and new. each time I went away from the group and tried to find what the landscape said. birds or the lakes, the desert sun or the vastness of rocky natural structures. they were not wrong per se, but they never looked up to see the sun, thought I. and the dusk would begin soon enough, and not having seen the brightness and the horizon, the firmament clouds say, and not having listened to the wind, then what would they do and what would they really know beyond statistics and local gossip?
two
Cars and Stars, and Coyote Road Abridged, Destinies and Nonduality-Advaita-Vedanta
first I was a incarnated and then not long after I was in a little store on the south west side of an intersection that was almost always grey and dirty, unwelcoming and represented the tough and rugged parts of a metropolis and not the good aspects. I wonder if anything is still there where that shop was. I suppose something is there. in the middle was a huge display with toy cars. i didn’t want the cars and never thought of it,- not even one car and not even once. I just liked how it all looked. I was not identified w/the world in the way others were. Later I was gifted many, many toy cars and the person taking care of me stole them.
decades later I sat with the two blondes on a large swing in the dusk in a northern town. one, the Piscean had long hair and one had short they were saying how the world was and were very smart. yes one was a Pisces and I don’t like Pisces but she was on the level and an exception. her eyes and her cheeks looked like a Pisces woman, as were the problems she struggled with. I told them they were great people the two of them which was true, but that i had to go. a few weeks later the one called me and I knew something was wrong at the first ring because she never called me. she was calling to say the blonde Piscean on the level woman was dead. she had been killed in a car accident by a drunk driver.
I thought of how much I didn’t like cars much anymore, and I was soon under the summer dusk but the dusk would turn to night which is dark and the summer would turn to autumn which is less colourful indeed and the autumn or fall speaks of winter and it’s bold and cold and grey times that wait like a disease or an unfortunate or even tragic destiny.
three
beyond the towns
In the denser parts of the town where there were more houses, more infrastructure, more electric light and other, there had been snow but it melted. Yet, not too far north of there where the town ended, an old brick church unintentionally marking a quick liminal way between the two, a church from another, simpler time, well there began snow. and that snow, because no heat troubled it, stayed on the ground and branches and the whole world there… evergreens-sumac-stones, little streams, wide and narrow paths, birch trees, shriveling strange old mushrooms plus a myriad of other things of course,…and far,- so far in a distant field framed by beige reeds that danced just a bit for a winter wind whose end had reached them, a hawk sat at the very top of an old tree that was leafless. it surely surveyed the landscape stoically, sagaciously, and it looked for some reason that it had been there forever. how the hawk is loved more than the world. how the hawk means more than the whole world. how the hawk by the snow in the abandoned winter fields under the opacity of the firmament is then the world.
four
those old leaves and the ridge or the valley floor
wandering along the old path. how old is that path and the surrounding ones and who made them through the summer way, the autumnal breeze, the winter snow wafting or the spring rain light and kissing the air? the aged tree, fallen a long time ago, off the ridge and across the valley floor, its root system exposed and looking like a thousand intertwined phantoms from an underworld unknown. up there somewhere, red sumac that receives the snow, and the sumac is calm, stoic, for maybe it knows something on the other side of drama or has never believed fully in the world. yes the blue sky peaks out briefly but soon, too soon, it is grey and overcast again. the evergreens and old leaves, the valley and ridge and the small and large paths see it through always. so shall we.
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