Anatomy of Night.
It’s a mix of muggy and cool in the evening now. A goth quiet streams through deliberately bleak streets. It sits still in black puddles — the electrical wires and tree limbs staring down at their reflections, their skinny winter faces wide with smiles — by morning, scarcely dark stains of forgotten ponds on the sidewalk.
Muffled punctuations down St. James, the sustain of classic rock from passing car, a perfect Procol Harum chord progression lifted from Bach distorted and dopplered. At Maiden Lane and Fair Street, unguarded laughter from a second floor window.
This laughter evokes envy.
There is deep longing in the bony branches adorned in emerald buds, the leaves having lived up to the action implied in their name. Now the past is forgotten; a canopy of fervent whispers will soon fill the blacked-out spaces.
At Green and Pearl, a woman smokes a cigarette and coughs on her stoop. Backlit, her hair is white straw — a frenzied, unselfconscious sorcerer’s bun.
This coughing strikes a synapse, the way we seasonally kill ourselves for what we love.
A small salute as I pass, and to all the people who once admired the mythology of shared scars and self-inflicted misdemeanors. Because we will fall, we will misjudge the gaps and the audience, because we will ultimately emit all sorts of errant thoughts and foulnesses that cannot be washed or written away.
A salvation in our deterioration, a disgorging of our rebirth, the rutted soil and the pullulating earthworms, the distracted longing scored by insects making love. An anatomy of vulgar acceptance that thrives in spring’s excellence, in spring’s current quiet.
Everyone is rejoicing with the same restraint. And I am softly singing Patsy Cline to my dog, Willa. Classic anthropomorphic adolescent lupine shame glimmers in her sweet eyes. The night is losing her baby teeth.