Now Then

Inner voices. A bad dream about falling and I had to get up, to break the narrative, get a drink, roll a smoke. Dark, but I can hear brittle leaves rustling outside, then a voice. Quite distinct. "Don't mess with The Kid", like listening to a Copeland opera. I realized I was imagining, but it took several minutes before I understood I was hearing a train across the river in Kentucky. Enough leaves off the trees that the sound reaches me for the first time in months. Like those monkeys with the typewriters, given world enough and time. I've heard it all, more or less, usually it's the wind, but sometimes a train or a logging truck. In the morning light I see that everything is moving toward an old sepia photograph, an old black and white film, a scratchy recording. I think of myself as border-line normal: my circumstances are different but my concerns are similar. The laundromat, the library, the liquor store, I have to narrow my focus, like blinders on a mule. The last time I plowed with a mule, there is a record of this, the mule was smarter than me. An acre of Pink-Eye Purple Hull peas, a cash crop to sell in Memphis. One good thing about strapping yourself in traces, is that mules are slow, so you can unstrap yourself if need be. What amazed me at the time (I may have been twelve) was that the mule knew more than me. Researching boat-building and traffic on the river, falling leaves, assuming the raft (Tom, after all) and a nudge toward confusion.