Jimmie Don't Live Here Anymore
The sky was impossibly blue, and though it was hurricane season, nothing had appeared weather wise. Until it did. The clouds moved in and the waves where they were before beautiful, even poetic, paced, curving in upon themselves, then became choppy and slightly vexatious. Jimmie was a friend I often went exploring places with and since he was living there full time he had an integrated way of being with the lands that can only be won through actual time and experience. What this means is that he knew the flora and fauna (though we didn’t call them that), and the nooks and crannies,- beach parts, piers, roads, so on. Not a bad thing. He told some tall tales but that never hurt anyone. When I asked him where his skateboard went he said, ‘A rival skateboarding gang grabbed it, then sailed it into the highway so that it would become destroyed.’ Hmm…maybe. Maybe not. You never knew with him. But he was, to use a cliche, a good egg overall. I hadn’t been around for a while and went calling one day. His mother was a beautiful majestic woman whose language and tone didn’t match her looks as far as I could interpret. She opened the door and curtly blurted out, ‘Jimmie don’t live here no more.’ I didn’t have much of a voice, and didn’t get the impression she wanted to let on anymore about it. I left and wandered off. Glancing over to my right, to water, I saw some birds flitting all about, loquacious and peripatetic, probably telling one another it was time to go. The storms were beginning for real. Yes time to go. The way of things. Cycles and seasons, and not always w/reasons. I never did see Jimmie again and sometimes wondered what became of him in the big old universe.
Sun Rain Bird Alone and my Sister’s Words Carved in Stone
I thought for a second that I would miss the sunset. Then I noticed it was just hidden in a cloud, and it soon showed itself again. Sometimes a light rain appeared upon the water and the night birds began to arrive in groups to the lake. Some trees made silhouettes of themselves against the sky, a foil, a juxtaposition, and also like a dream. A group a bit distant talks and the groundskeeper goes past in a little cart. The sun eventually goes away, blanketed somehow by the horizon and its things. Petals receive drops and seem lonesome, forgotten about, in decline. Their peak has been reached and the autumnal will soon wither them. Air. Fresher air. Whimsy still. Stones. Carved words in the stones. My sister from another life they say, her words about something, about trees, are there. I had never heard of her or her brother, myself, before a few years ago. They were both poets. She said that she missed her brother after he passed away. So we meet again. I in another body and her through her words that the late summer rains descend upon. A bird alights on a long vessel. It’s alone. Maybe it’s an autodidact. Maybe it is like Jonathan Livingston Seagull from that famous book, but taking a rest. It’s pretty calm. It looks like it is used to being alone, going it alone. One of the solitary souls of the universe. And it seems somehow like it has done this all before.
(Image credit: Brian Michael Barbeito)
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