theater

A life withdraws, leaving only words to struggle with. The rain exhales, a hush of continuity, the rush of blood always towards rust. The road spits and hisses, the flume of water pressed between it and the air as traffic passes. The light leaves and homes take on their portions of noise and glow. The flitting urgency of birds preparing for a cold wet night, everything measured in hunger, warmth, and shelter. I wait, feeling the latency of mortal notions as the world goes boiling by.

The hours clot, coiled smoke caught beneath the eaves, gnats and mosquitoes following carbon trails and current distresses. The neighborhood heaves its comings and goings, cars idling along the curbside, children running in the rain. The chain-link fence suddenly just another gathering of steel, sieving through the winds and droplets, casting nets into the night. This evening a kind of evidence kept against the tide of forgetting. A letter folded around a photo, a Christmas card cast from across the freezing ocean.

The rain falls in strings and gushes, in smatterings and encores and all the varied measurements of applause. There are no curtains, merely circumstances, stories separated not by subject but by breath. The telling edits, and the prolonged pause, the as if of a love song performed like a funeral march. I while away the weather, wind and heat and signals of smoke. The words subside, leaving only life to go on living.