La tristesse
How this all came together, no idea, but I arrive at the place my love once lived, crossing the tracks that divide two parallel roads, into the heart of this small Pennsylvania town, while my ailing car radio works to stifle “Oh My Heart” by R.E.M.
So little time to hunker down and wait till washed-out roads are cleared of floodwater and if necessary fixed. Waiting unaccompanied amid drear fall memories. The doom-tolling railroad crossings. A boxcar barroom in matte black punctuated by neon, and windowless. Standing water in stubbled fields reflecting only grays. The chrome yellow of a receding school bus the only daub of true color anywhere.
Rubber and diesel, tires and fuel. Caught amid a squall of semi-trucks and the crawl of a combine. The green unruly. Belligerent.
I pull onto the shoulder and tell you of the whispered voices in the twilit woods. You are silent, doubtful, which stings. I might not be hiding something; maybe you just aren’t looking.
durera
We pivot on an island, gasoline spraying, how green is my valley, the kneeling martyr flinching for the axe.
Thinking we might go start a bar fight just to recall what it was like to feel something.
We’re ocean-dwellers clinging to a washed-up buoy of apparent certainty—the sands shifting around us—while pretending the sea hasn’t sucked itself backward.
The wide horizon. Anticipatory. A quivering knife edge.
Phantoms of the forest scaling shredded trunks under the quarrels of ravens. Under yet darker things.
toujours
Could there have been a moment of reconciliation? Was there a frail song on the wind, obscured by the flapping of laundry as the gusts arrived? Lost to the ravenous monster we call the past. Lost to the hungry, decadent ghosts.
Long dark blues. We were here once—is that even enough?—and we think this is how it felt to be us.
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Image © Monica Lunn