“Damn, is it the fall?
Time to revisit the past”
-Aubrey Graham
This is just to say I’ve breezed by the old place a few times now, each more quickly than the last. Each time the crunch underfoot was mushier. But then, so am I. I’ve heard tell the fountains still spurt in the garden. I had no time for their antics then, when we were filling the halls with semantics and dared drape our dusty hopes over the dinette as if to protect it. It was cherry, and in the refracted light thereupon, chubby gnats twirled and died. There was a susurration once. You remember— there under the small, kind moon I compared your beauty to, we gripped one another, each other’s attention and breath.
Anyway, the light was harsh this last morning when I passed, in a fog. Streetlamps still lingered, and (dare I say) malingered, effervescent as memory. It smelled like nutmeg and the blue peal of a toddler in daddy’s safe sweeping hug. I shuddered and quickened my pace.
This is just to share what I heard the neighborhood kids say, the ingrates:
“Only risk that cul de sac in the growing seasons, when the spindling bulbs shade the gravestones. Listen in the underwater of July for the drowning of all hope among the anemones that bush out and up to the cement gazebo steps.”
No respect. They google our names, read the etchings in the tree bark we’d forgotten we carved. Read them for fossils. We all stood in the moldering leaves the last time, too far from the filigree to see any detail; a plash stirred the silence and they risked a look to where I strode away, behind them. A call: “Hey mister, what happened here?”
