8
In old Westerns when you saw a train at nine a.m.
it was still leaving at noon, growing fainter
as the day wore on as if it had been etched in
with a stencil, with slanting pencils of
sunlight. Van Gogh’s leaky jar placed in a marsh,
its cross-hatched reflection on the still surface
of the water. Such are the breakages in Japanese
beneath the pencil marks of an exercise book.
It doesn’t look like that way anymore, but it
still feels the same. Sun dried flies line
the window sill. A measure of bewilderment
that was reading the novel. Mr. Shawn wrote,
“roach appears on page three and has not moved
in three pages.” There were certain dry periods
one couldn’t be expected to re-live. When the spell
was broken you felt the link snap inside you.
As per usual, the story ended with the bad guys
getting rounded up and the neighbors moving
to new locations before the paint was dried on
the picket fence. Its none of my buisness,
but it is funny that you never got anywhere
when you were young etc, etc...