matchbook songs and gypsy hymns
Lately I've been having this day dream. (lately I've been making this daydream.) and in it I am no particular age, just a pair of eyes, and maybe some blowing hair, and I seem to be blowing around some vague but ethereal place where bob dylan or van morrison is always playing, and I am standing at the edge of an old road, looking down into a very green and coppery valley, and there are ruins everywhere, large and orangey tan and not lonely but very strong and old and so very poised... and there is a parked car near by me, and I am young and someone or someones very close to me, very familiar and rambunctious, are standing near, but not near enough for me to see them...oh but I know them! whoever they are we are known to each other, and we stand and admire or maybe drive by and my hair blows around some more, and all of a sudden it is raining lightly and I'm on pine needles, I'm on pine needles around a lake like a large flat bowl, eating salami sandwiches on kaiser rolls (how did the kaiser get a roll named after him?) and feeling the quiet the quiet the quiet! all around me, because we are in a forest, or at the edge, and ol' bob and ol' van just keep sing sing singing along, making me yet more nostalgic for something I could almost place my finger on... but just like a water surface it would dissipate at the touch and I would have nothing again, and I'd rather have this vague swimming in my head of something beautiful that maybe and probably happened long ago than ever be sure and suddenly see it for something separated from me...I'd rather it swim and surround me, so I could never quite see it but could smell it at my waist and pooling in the dips near my collar bone, than to look at it and see it glide away. orpheus, orpheus, don't look back. just keep going and don't make the same mistake again.
if I ever have boys I will name them Judah and Ephraim, and may they be impish with dark and wayward hair all willynilly every whichaway, and may they run about and be ferile lads and do whatever it is that pleases them. may they roam all the world with me and see all the green and coppery valleys of france so that maybe one day when they are older they will remember it better than their mother did, in her diaphanous and grasping ways, and may they remind her that once she was too was wild and willynilly and roamed the world and saw very many of those coppery valleys out yonder.
if I ever have boys I will name them Judah and Ephraim, and may they be impish with dark and wayward hair all willynilly every whichaway, and may they run about and be ferile lads and do whatever it is that pleases them. may they roam all the world with me and see all the green and coppery valleys of france so that maybe one day when they are older they will remember it better than their mother did, in her diaphanous and grasping ways, and may they remind her that once she was too was wild and willynilly and roamed the world and saw very many of those coppery valleys out yonder.