Memory Loss

I lose track of where I am. Reading about some dead painter, a flight of fancy, a conceit, almost, where a particular play of light trips my memory to a particular fall afternoon on Cape Cod. I only vaguely remember, she was backlit, a halo shimmered, a double rainbow; I remember thinking at the time that nothing should be that beautiful, the way specific aspects feathered into my consciousness. Every year, at this time, watching the last of the heat escape into the ether. It's a dance. Mike or TR should write a score, diminished chords. Nothing as it's ever been. Bach is always fall into winter. Barges pushing upstream. Not unlike a dream you might have had, where everything could be lost, and nothing won. I have a headache, and that doesn't happen often, I don't keep aspirin around. Sitting in one place too long, reading. The cure is a bundled walk along the ridgeline, It's nice to be outside, poking things with a stick. Sometimes the jokes are a little too private, that damn french fry had lodged in my brain, a Ragu commercial from hulu, a mom telling a kid that asparagus was like a green french fry. I did go on to make a risotto, though I wanted to stop and make a cream of asparagus soup. Next time. Standard risotto recipe, but the stock elevated things. Ted Enslin died last month, one of the great outsider poets. I published six or seven of his books, and we had a falling out, as often happened when I was publishing a lot, eight books a year and maybe 20 broadsides, that a poet would assume I'd publish whatever the next thing was. He sent me something, I didn't like it and sent it back, he never talked to me again. Nonetheless, a fine poet, a man with whom I foraged on several occasions, with whom I fixed several meals. He was fearless in the littoral. Would eat anything that had a shell. We'd boiled periwinkles in sea water, dug them out of their shells with safety pins, and dipped them in garlic butter. Broke into the Celebration Stout, which I'd brewed for the Queen's Jubilie, or some imagined occasion. With some nutrients and a great deal of patience, I'd gotten the alcohol level above ten percent. We got snookered. When I got him on the bus back to Maine, the next morning, he looked like shit.