Thursday, June 5, 2014

Site Specific

A train across the river. Just a light breeze and the spring leaves are still soft so the only other sound is a susurration and a Mocking Bird imitating a Towhee. Kim got away in good form, off to the races, and I piddled about, read a few things out loud. I've been working hard to align the written word with the spoken word, and I spend some time with that, watching the way words form in my mouth. I'm not even an average naturalist, so I don't pretend to know. That stuff out there, the other stuff, is beyond my pay-grade. I watch frogs, I have a casual relationship with a fox; in my defense I'm actually a pretty nice person; I rarely lose my temper, ask any of my friends. A whole grain cereal, for breakfast, force-meat on toast for lunch; and an afternoon comparing alphabets from two extinct languages that have never been deciphered. I had to fire off a couple of emails concerning the upcoming gig, and I'm not used to staying connected. My idea of staying connected is that someone would find my body within a couple of weeks. Brautigan, right? Lew Welch is better, where you just wander off and there is no body. Drew emails that he and Barnhart, the music guy, want to come out when I get back. The clouds are dark all day, thunder, it rains so hard I can feel it, shaking my bones. This is it, pretty baby; I have to go, it's rumbling like crazy. It stopped raining, finally, at around midnight; the cessation of drumming awakened me. After the power went out I'd read for a couple of hours by headlamp, harvested several buckets of clean rain water. The house was close, from battening down against the rain. I opened several windows and was struck with that cool post-storm oxygenated air. A lovely thing. When I go outside to pee, the ground feels like a sponge, and the tree-rain patters. It's very quiet for maybe half-an-hour, then the frogs break the silence. The power comes back on, the house hums and the light is almost unbearable. Get a drink and roll a smoke, my solution to almost everything. Six hours of hard rain, and I wonder how the driveway handled that. I restore order, as well as I can, write for a while, teasing out a couple of sentences; cook a large breakfast, potatoes, eggs, toast with force-meat, and read at the island, pulp fiction, just something to occupy my mind. Light is just breaking and I need to sleep.

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