Time Studies #75

I could be riding in a truck, but the narrative was familiar, constructed of big sheets of weathered plywood, encrusted with cement, something with girls, black fabric of night, the street corner in daylight

Usually I felt that I might retreat into my mind, but I soon realized most anyone could see in there what I was thinking, it was like an abandoned motel

The succulent cacti swelled with information, the purplish ravine coursed over the rocks, pungent sage and mountain laurel with red berries were full of small birds. It was breezy and confusing to some of us.

Her joy was so amazine it seemed to represent generations of women, both inside and outside of her family. Many wanted to feel a part of it. It marked a generation of people who passed on her street.

Some secret in the blood as if it were words, engineering, direction---something static, objective like that. Present in her voice.

Somehow we get the message that we are too late. Of course, we must go anyway, even if we are the last to know. We must go.

She invited me to go to her wedding in Vegas. I felt she might understand why I would not go. But I hoped that she'd be too busy, too happy, to even think about me.

And a thin film is brushed over the surface, as if by a deliberate hand, like water from the stream across smooth granite, like a sugar glaze across pastry dough, like history across sweetness of past seasons.