So full of things. Trees and houses and cars, sunlight and breeze and scents from the blooming flowers and the car exhausts and the young leaves and the gray asphalt over which tires rumbled. And sounds. Engines and birds and barking dogs, talk and music, and the leaves rustling to give the breezes a voice. Sometimes the traffic sounds like surf, especially when it blends with wind.
So the perfectly lovely day, indifferent to our coming and going, vibrated on the edge of my thoughts, enveloping them, transforming mundane tasks into arcane rituals fraught with meaning. The warmth and the sunlight and the trees that filtered them took their places in the back of my mind, and shadows shrank and then lengthened, and everything was still there even when I was attending to something else. So the perfectly lovely day edged into my memory and inhabited it, and communed with the other days already there.
For it I've added a room made of words to the house. It couldn't care less. The room is really for me.
Sunday Verse
April Morning Walk
by Brian Patten
So many of those girls I loved are gone now,
Gone to ash that skin so inexpertly kissed,
Those stomachs I was hot for, gone beyond diaries into flame.
When the years tore up our surface beauty and threw it away
Like the bright wrappings on a parcel
What was left was what links all the breathing world, an empathy,
The buried knowledge of our going.
It's so easy to forget how the years have poured away
And taken out of sequence and before their time
So many who deserved to stay longer on this lush earth.
Along the streets in which I walked with them
The horse chestnut leaves are opening like Chinese fans
The dawn's clear light varnishes houses and gardens
And freezes forever under its glittering surface
So much half-remembered anguish.