Of Something

Remembering for himself he thought of fields that would be walked at night. Loneliness had passed and had left him awake. He sat and thought. Things can be useless. Bird. Soul. Being solitary can have all the vacancies, even of itself. There was one, like a graceful vulture stiff in its lengths, that, as he walked a country road, flew to the top of a power pole before him, and that on his approach, left it for the next. He soon came to that one. After all that it was a distant bird in the sky, and, disappearing, the sky was gray. Things that never were and seem to have collapsed upon the glances that might have had them caught. Or an old black panel truck, came up from behind with the smell of the tallow factory there. A plump face that seemed to know him, bent over a pudding thumb receding back into the dirty corner darkness of the open window, from some obscene gesture as it passed before him, only hinted at in its mystery.

February 1972