Stray observations

The morning ablutions. Frail light married to grass, and dew the final refuge of night, which is lingering and slow to die. Somehow, abstractly, like scent on a pillow when love has failed. The rich fragrance of autumn, so unlike anything, that glassy smell of decay. A few billion cells photosynthesizing their last.

A cluster of young children, sleepy-eyed and anxious, stand on a street corner and cling to the fingers of their bleary, coffee-sipping parents. A cold mist rises from the lawns. How insignificant, how transitory a thing, any moment of any life.

Autumn’s fine filament filtering down the bronzed elms and beeches.

The home of the first girl he loved. Or, thought he loved. (What is the difference after these years?) Slowing down, crawling past, and half hanging out the window for a better view. Arousing suspicion from the elderly neighbors, stalwart members of the neighborhood watch, curtains drawn a sliver. Slows and finally stops, paying reverence to his nascent heart, still fluid and ideal. He remembers lying in the grass, their bodies reverberating warmth. He remembers standing at her window in the cold. He remembers sitting so close to her on a piano bench that their thighs grew moist. He remembers the sound as they pulled apart, the lubricious suction of skin. He is pulled by regret, and the incommensurable tides of life.

In the transfigured residue of loss, all things gain their well earned grace.

The Steinway echoes over the parish ghosts, resounding. The stained glass – birth, crucifixion, resurrection – throws fractals of sun about the sanctuary. Rejoice, rejoice! Rejoice.

He remembers a million bits of viscera - willowy women naked and soft, adolescent afternoons whiled away with friends, wringing the last minutes from a late summer evening with his father and a baseball. Some things he remembers for the thousandth time. Some for the first. And some for the last.

The world takes and takes and takes. Small pieces, smaller than we know. But so many.