Running late this morning. Here, therefore, is something I wrote and posted a few months ago. I hope you like it this time.
It's an old, abandoned graveyard — tombstones cracked and mildewed, statues with black, lichen tears molder and decay — on a sunny spring afternoon. Butterflies and dragonflies in the warm afternoon breeze light on sepulchers and crypts. There is a different quiet than you might imagine among the graves, the soft buzzing and chirping quiet of the daytime meadow. It's a setting out of place. All the ghosts have blown away across the field and are caught, flapping, in the highest limbs of the line of trees along the road. The reaper has shed his robes and is taking a dip in the nearby stream. It's a zombie picnic scene in the dreamy afternoon.
Paul sits at the end of the otherwise empty bar drooping like excess out of steam. More dust than you can imagine swims in the bright contrast of sun pouring midday through the small, high window beside the liquor shelves. A song you've never heard and won't remember when you hear it again plays reluctantly from the crooked speaker on the back wall, stiff wire snaking awkwardly from behind it to an unfinished hole poked through the cheap wallboard two feet below and slightly to the left. Paul is not in a noticing frame of mind but his blinking eye watches the slow journey of a single drop of condensation crawling down his glass to join its brothers and sisters in the sloppy pool below. Low self-esteem, I suppose, brings him here out of season when the place is lowly and sad. He's never felt adequate for evening, when nighttime raises the bar.
When the sun shines on my grave it warms my soul. The Greeks share one word, pneuma, for spirit and wind and air, haunted softly by the sweet scent of wildflowers on this waltzing afternoon breeze.
I like that one.
Hello, friends. How are you today?
Later. Love
