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January 27 - March 14, 2019
Low in the east a red moon was coming up through the clouds, a crooked smile, shard of shellrim pendant from some dark gypsy ear.
If I was a younger man, he told himself, I would move to them mountains. I would find me a clearwater branch and build me a log house with a fireplace. And my bees would make black mountain honey. And I wouldn’t care for no man.
The old man did not appear again. The dog lowered his head on his paws and peered out at the night with wrinkled and sorrowing eyes.
Some nights a tall gaunt hound came and peered in the screen-door at him and he would speak to it, it standing there high-shouldered and flat-looking, not moving, and then it would be gone and he could hear its feet padding off through the yard and the clink of its collar.
In the morning the rain had stopped and there was a chill in the air and smoke. He smiled at that, for he was waiting and weathers and seasons were his timepiece now. There were still warm days but that didn’t matter to him.
Bowing the grass in like sadness the dew followed him home and sealed his door.
Low in the east and beyond the town a gray soulless dawn gnawed the horizon into shape.
He cranked the engine and slid the gearshift upward and the old man felt himself rocketed backward violently with a welter of dust boiling and receding before him and the dog standing there in the drive with the gravel dancing about him and then they cut one long rattling curve and were on the road and leaving, and the old man, clutching his cane, holding the dirty little sack between his knees, looked back at the dog still standing there like some atavistic symbol or brute herald of all questions ever pressed upon humanity and beyond understanding, until the dog raised his head to clear the
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He continued on, to the porch where a yellow bulb held forth its dull steadfast light, to a place of surcease.
THE FEW SMALL WINDOWS were glassless but for a jagged side or corner still wedged in the handmade sashes. The roofshakes lay in windrows on the broad loft floors and this house housed only the winds.
Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth’s crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth’s wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with roots, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.
And he no longer cared to tell which were things done and which dreamt.
They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.
