idleness and augury no. 3
[No. 1] [No. 2]
City-hued doves sleep in the rain outside my window. They perch on a dead tree so dead it looks like it was planted that way, all strung up with dead vines. Outside it rains and rains and rains. I sit here, listening to Kurt Wagner sing: Across the interstate the world is like another world.
Rain drips across the window as if across the music and into random, rainy memories of road. For instance: the slick highway by the graveyard where they buried my grandfather in the rain, years ago. And the shaved-ice shop, closed for good, that sat in ruins on the other side. The soldier who played “Taps” wore glasses so fogged and dripping with weather it was as if he’d worn them so as not to see. Day is done / Gone the sun. So as to see nothing but rain.
Rain, like idle thought, a confluence: all loose things swept together. The mourning doves keep quiet, heads bowed into their soft-feathered bodies.
ben tapeworm