COMMUNIQUE

Through the open window nothing stirs except a tattered white curtain. Perhaps baffling that the drift is from inside. A calm prelude, it might be, to an immolation of Scotia, the Pacific Lumber Company town with placid population, hotel, theater, library, and duck pond now commemorating the redwood empire. I might sit by and do nothing.

It's a breeze that scarcely rustles the hairs along my arm. The windowsill is only slightly coated with dust. Faint tuckered out memories pass unchallenged, leaving room for bliss no one sees, a host of gold pan ghost wingers, of images that no longer require passports.

And so one has to admit, musn't I? that these evening birds we've known, the best of words, worlds on a distant barge and all the accoutrements of civilization have come to this. There is no depth deep enough to fathom a blade of grass.

I think this is why I cannot draw. The necessary reduction seems hardly worth the effort, or like learning poetry, rhyme and meter. I'd rather pull weeds.

No two will ever come back quite the same, or grains of a nebula. For purposes of drawing, it's a summation of the usual glances.

Music is somewhat better, gone right away and impossible to repeat, exactly. The study of harmony is fine, for awhile, recordings are interesting, sort of, sarcophagus tunes. The words of authors are brought to life by reading, and start their own dances, through portals across the desert of time and space. Somehow the containers give way to contents giving way to the way.

It is delightful, knowing that the usual senses have their place, riding like hay wagon drivers who will hop off the buckboard by a stream for skinny dipping.

For present purposes, I have to reprise my contribution to high school culture, 1956. I loosened the nuts on the exhaust manifold of my Chevy. You can imagine, across the chasm of years, what a ruction that cheered on. Gross, was it not? Like learning to draw . . .

So here we are, with these examples tied into a raft for this floating world.

I'msure my mentors are this pair of hummingbirds hovering at the brim of my hat. Their feeder under the eve is four feet away. As the sun sinks beneath the horizon, they hover and bob, and then are gone.

So Igo to have a look. The feeder needs refilling.

There is always something. To think how it all began in a nebula far away, so long ago, beyond the time imagined today. Sort of a crude drawing.

But you get the idea.

Dateline, Santa Clara

Zodiac, 49ers stadium

Galaxy, the milky way