6.8.04

an august haibun

chill of the morning:
rabbits and their daughters stop,
listening waiting

Up there as I walk is a big fat half-moon, just like she always is. It still shocks me after almost four decades on this planet that the moon is visible in the blue sky of morning and afternoon. It's also shocking how bright she is up there, with her reflected wisdom and kind stewardship of the sky. I know the moon isn't a woman nor is it kind but indulge me. She's watching over me this morning, she guides my path, she helps me where I need to go.

crunching of my feet
on the new Junction Road sidewalk
marks my lonely way

The songs they played at Tom's funeral: "Rainy Days and Mondays," "Dance With My Father," "Sail Away." The expressions on people's faces: every shade of the emotional rainbow. People kept disappearing to grieve privately then popping back up again as though they weren't just sobbing in the bathroom. It was the pictures that hit me most: kid Tom, teenage Tom, Tom and his wife looking hippieish and impossibly young, Tom on his sailing trip from earlier this year, the water so blue. I realized that I don't have enough friends. It hurt. I cried but I don't think I was crying for Tom.

ambient highway
noise whispering in my ear,
turn up the headphones

I am listening to Aldo Brizzi's Brizzi do Brasil, a rather brilliant piece of work, a neo-classical composer constructing and then deconstructing Brazilian pop music. As I come around the corner, Margareth Menezes and Arnaldo Arnauth are dueling over who gets to be the coolest-sounding person on the planet. The Gateway Computer Store parking lot, the Outback Steak House parking lot, the maxi-strip-mall parking lot. At what must be 6:00 a.m. there are three Target employees outside smoking, bullshitting, steeling themselves for the day. I keep walking right through the lot, Virginia Rodrigues' beautiful operatic voz like the moon in my ears. I have somewhere to be.

tiny bold sweat beads
forming on my forehead now--
it must be August

My brain keeps trying to think of other things, but I'm trying to stay focused on what I can see, what I can hear, what I can smell, what I can feel, what I can taste. These purple flowers pop up out of nowhere, what are they, just thistles probably, but still they're something, they grow, what right to I have to judge a thistle? It's holy too. These dandelions are holy, the people driving in these cars are holy, they all have dreams, if they're good dreams I hope they come true. I am currently floating somewhere in the atmosphere, I think I can see you from where I am. You look like ants, little wonderful holy hardworking social ants, you all carry hundreds of times your weight on your backs, truly a marvel. Me, I carry no weight at all this morning, I and Caetano and Tom Ze and Aldo Brizzi, we all levitate, look up, look up, maybe you can see us

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