Writing

Wasted afternoons, spent beneath low slung clouds, mirrors posing as water to large swaths of cerulean skies. Long, tepid afternoons, on the front porches of strangers, trading gossip, swatting mosquitoes, sweating in the stifling heat in the throes of cheap whiskey.

Afternoons in the apartments of girls, sweat stained sheets after discussing Proust, of whom I’ve not read a single word. The lazy fly buzzes the window and we trade metaphors and meaning as the light skips through the window making lattices on the floor.

The beginning of a certain evening in Paris, in Pigalle, wandering the streets in search of a guide book to take me home, streetlights like lighthouses, streets dusted in pollen and moon. Resisting the temptation to switch to you, to utter the word that hovers over all our gestures.

Trailing down a street glittering with green glass, the hem of a skirt brushing along the ground.  In the morning, swans trumpet and starlings make elaborate shapes beneath obsidian clouds. They seem to say, “nothing has changed.”

I painted a mural of the sky in the middle of my ceiling. On the outside, I put all of the things that I used to be, an astronaut, a diver, a teacher, a mid thirteenth century philosopher who held that the world was comprised entirely of my failures, an auto mechanic in Sydney Australia who specialized in kangaroo engine clean up, a Rhodes scholar. In the end it looked nothing like the Sistine Chapel, or anything else painted on a roof during the Renaissance if that’s what you were expecting. It looked like a flock of crows, flying west, away from a burning sun, the bottoms of their wings tinged with green. Don’t ask me to make sense of it. Don’t ask me to make sense of anything.