punta umbria

The frogs sounded out in the schoolyard for the first time in many year last night. I was out on the back porch, lurking in shadow and smoke. Rats scrabbled from the roof to the scrub pine that leans dangerously over the house, scampering and scratching in the night. The rain had let up for a few hours, and that calm that is the voice of all manner of prognostication stretched itself out in languid certitude. That humbling crush of the air itself slowing long enough its exodus to pool and still before it runs away in gust and breeze. I went inside for the long night left me. The world without me was in order.

Tonight the winds are on the rise, and I envy them their wanderings and sprints. I am heavy with heat and torpor, dumb and dirty and more than a little insane. I feel the dull cry of my beating heart, I taste the flat bitter note of old coffee and a strange metallic tang on my teeth. I live here where idle moments dwell, in caves and boxes and in holes dug hastily in damp earth. I live on the scrapings of human kindness and the spillings of a culture of glut and greed. The winds run wild, and I am a small still shape, spitting fumes and epithets.

The house is thick your absence, full of these articles of spent faith. Electric light plays electric tricks, a shape moving in the next room, your hand reaching for the door. The air is layered with these shed hopes and disheveled dreams. Your dress folded over the back of the rocking chair, your underwear tossed about the room. These years that speed away, growing small and distant, fleeting and dismissive of my touch. These years all gathered in scars and knots, the tangled stories of cities and all these gathered strangers we spend between lives. Some sense each breath holds, of where it is going and where it has been. Some measure of want against the fluidity of the world pacing in the night.