One Day

Water falling on dirt: sound and texture. Words fail to describe how the sky longs for the sun, how the birds are voiceless. My Granddad used to say, “There is nothing that cannot be said,” but even that is not said anymore, dead these 24 years and the better off for it. What comes next must be a childhood memory of Spring when the nights were thick and dark, lit dimly only by stars, and the town was smaller, laboring beneath the deep hoarseness of a northeast wind with a taste of salt and metal howling down from Canada and skipping like a stone across the Great Lakes, only to push against this house and rattle my bedroom windows. Somewhere in the distance there is a train, rather, there are trains and there are great tankers on the lake. A chief element of memories is tenacity. Memories are as tenacious as a dog digging at an old bone and when they drop themselves at your feet, you blink your eyes and shake your head and then bring them to focus as if you were brushing dust off shards of ancient pottery that has long forgotten what it looked like when it was whole. Sometimes memories are locked doors without keys, unopened books in languages we cannot read, bleached survivors of a perennial storm of forgetfulness, faces perpetually rebuilt from last night’s dreams, bodies fashioned from baling wire and Styrofoam, their angles and attitudes curated, set down in precise and seemly environments like the ziggurats of Ninevah or office towers in New York Once upon a time, I had a vision where I harnessed the memory of your face to a team of wild horses, then drove them across a dark field of forgotten dreams strewn with artifacts of a desperate archeology beneath a full moon glistening like an eye full of tears. I awoke in my bedroom, on the floor naked and alone, shivering, a striped horse blanket draped across my shoulders, damp with sweat and tears. Thanks for reading Paul’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Paul’s Substack is free today