we are travelers

Out early to mow the lawn, hedge the sides along the house, prune the indomitable rose bushes where they encroach full on the sidewalk, social as they are, wanting contact. The air is full of moisture, the morning gray and damp and half-lit, still redolent of summer but with the first susurrating pretense of wind, with headstart falling leaves a fine example to their brethren, inspiring the eternal corps of potential yardwork.

In the car (the still-new 1997 Buick, the first plank in a meticulous middle age custom coffin, time still to get it right) the same improv tape that I couldn't get all that into from 1995 the other day now seems golden.

The guitar is discordant and steady, and someone who doesn't know how to play the violin is making that work, steady tritone and minor 2nd marcato bowing and a naive Casiotone keyboard trying to color the proceedings with warm, humorous tones, like a guy handing out candy bars at a burial. This moment from 1995 and my moment now make sense together; this layer of the past and the present align cleanly and in concord. The wish is just for a drummer to fix it but none arrives.

At the bus stop now and wind out on the edge of a storm (thinking of the hurricane offshore, but the air comes from the north) is forcing waves of cool air across the parking lot, changing the tone of the morning and heralding real fall. Storm sentinels bringing a feeling that everybody in this Greyhound line shares, a kind of poetry thrown into the dull everyday. Will we rise? Indeed, we are travelers, we are lords of the road, we are north to the great city.