Lost Marbles

A loud noise in the night, something has fallen over. Pretty sure I'm alone, I don't sense another presence, and the sound was a one-time thing, but I have to get up and see what it was. I keep a bunch of tools stacked in the corner next to the back door and a dynamic tension or a gust of wind shook the house just enough and the shovel decided to fall. Turn on the radio, the show on NPR called "Crossing Boundaries", usually quite good, and it doesn't disappoint. A sound that can only be Bela Fleck. Get a drink and roll a smoke, consider my failures. A Greg Brown song I haven't heard in a while, about putting summer in a jar. I'm hungry and there's just enough tenderloin left for a sandwich, spread with roasted parsnip and mayonnaise. Elvis Costello, then Robert Clay. More music than I've listened to in a while, gets me out of myself, or deeper in, I can't decide, really. What I meant to write about, last night, but got distracted, was life at the margin. Through the afternoon, yesterday, I was thinking how small choices led to major changes. Reading those Magic Realists will do that to you. I think about translation, an almost impossible task, for which I depend on others. I can tease out Catullus. Harvey used to read Lorca to us, when we were printing. It was beautiful, begged the question of understanding. Those days were like that. Hypo Clearing Agent would breeze in, recount a tale from doing "Peter Grimes" in Baltimore, we'd walk across the marsh and get a couple of quarts of ale, toke, and talk until the sun came up over Cape Cod Bay. Still tripping on what we'd left behind. K had a friend visiting over the week-end, Robert, vacating his house so the soon-to-be ex could pack her things. Awkward, but shit happens. We had a beer Friday, then Saturday he came in the museum and looked around. He was impressed with how well the Modernism show was hung. It's virtually perfect, visually, everything centered at 57 inches and the spacing is meticulous. Then I talked him through the glass show, he seemed to understand how one handled such things. Ships passing in the night, you know? Not sentimental, or anything even close, but I do miss that other warm body in which I could confide. Life on the edge is rough, because you're always alone, and a single step away from disaster. You take measures, wear a vest, carry matches, watch the footing, but a single misplaced step and you're over the rim. Some frogs fucking is no cause for alarm. It's Spring, today, I think, and this is what happens, the frozen world awakens, sheds the burden of ice and snow. Black stick trees are a thing of the past. You can't deny there is color now, fucking pink, man. I saw pink today, and the first blush of red-bud. When I was hunkered down, on that opposite ridge, smoking, out of the wind, with copious sunlight, I had to grin, another winter dead and gone. Not that we can't still get bad weather, but I've been warm and there is color. Hope springs eternal. I need to do my laundry because the house smells like dirty socks. My early warning system. But I think I'll just clip brush and read tomorrow, do my laundry on company time during the week. Paul Simon is a good song writer. The wind picks up from the northwest. The moon is insistent, out my writing window, a lost love, darting away. I try to not make too much of anything, but there was a crow, today, that bothered me. I was walking back to the house, from some excursion down the driveway, and there was a crow hopping along in front of me. I'm a sucker for crows, they seem to portend something. I only followed because it was the way I was going. One crow hopping down a logging road. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a crow. Wait. What is meaning?