Still Light

What's the deal, that I can still see? Twilight glooms around, but the darkness is held at bay. Simply a candle, with a mirror I use to magnify the light. You asked a question, I couldn't answer, we were locked in that eye to eye conversation. Where everything meant a great deal. Who is that, in the background? No one plays a jazz flute that well. Sounds like Miles, just the occasional note, to let you know I'm there. Kind of blue. Oh, wait, "Kind Of Blue" then "Bitch's Brew" which certainly alerted me to something different. Blow your own horn. Nice batch of morels this morning, so fried a shredded potato cake with a egg over-easy, topped with mushrooms and shallots. A few hours later I eat the same thing again. Second time out, I run into a Timber Rattlesnake in its yellow color phase. We both back up. The color threw me off, but I remembered reading about it when I had my last run-in, they're usually quite dark. No doubt what it was. Muggy day, more rain forecast for tonight and tomorrow. I reread some food essays by John Thorne, then the wonderful final section of Levi-Strauss's four volume :Mythologiques". I might be the only person in Scioto County to have read all of Levi-Strauss. I find him difficult and rewarding, like Beckett on Proust. Wrote a page that I saved a couple of lines from, and threw the rest away. Too esoteric, even by my standards, and too revealing, by a long shot, some things are best swept under a rug. I was trying to do something, in language, that I couldn't quite pull off. Good to try, good to fail, indicates a learning curve. Nothing succeeds like failure for leaning. Drawing the sheer-line on a lap-strake boat is no easy task, making an eggplant dish interesting, raising a child. Most relationships have, embedded in them, the seeds of failure, been my experience; that the very thing that was an attraction turns unbearable. Her laugh, for instance, becomes haughty, an insistence on buying new appliances, or a fixation on a scent that costs hundreds of dollars an once. I standardly break open anything, to smell what's inside. More a habit than anything. Mother Mary comes to me.

Three crows, nothing said,
a silence you could
drive trucks through.