It makes me sad to think of the skunk as road kill. The two skunks who visited my yard almost nightly early this summer were quite fetchingly cute, with their enormous, bushy tails sticking up, and their odd gait. The pair also got playful a few times, and frolicked together on my dead lawn. They were a lot of fun to watch, even though I was worried about startling them and getting sprayed, or perhaps one of the feral cats offending them and getting sprayed. But that never happened, so I miss the skunks.
We are to have five more warm days, then a sudden decline of temperatures as clouds move in. Showers are still predicted for a week from tomorrow, though the chance they will come indeed is still set at just above 50%. I'll take it. For now I'm enjoying the anticipation, which pleasure will remain even if the rain itself doesn't materialize. If three or four such predictions fail to be realized then I'll start to worry. And get pissed off. But sooner or later rain will arrive, and be cause for much celebration.
Shopping brought no surprises, other than the unpleasant one of the absence from the last two stores I went to of the chocolate donuts I usually buy. Had I known that those stores would both be out of them I'd have bought them at the first store, which had an ample supply. I had to substitute the seasonal special of pumpkin spice donuts. I think that pumpkin spice has grown annoyingly ubiquitous, and I am not especially fond of it, but of the options available at the last store it was the best choice. It was too late, and too much trouble, to backtrack to the first store.
Okay, I've gone around and closed the windows, and took a look outside, and the almost-full moon has risen and is very bright. It's pleasantly cool and I'm going to go out and watch the sky for a while, despite the lingering odor of (probably defunct) skunk. I forgot to put my beer in the refrigerator to chill, so it won't be ready for drinking for another half hour or more. I can time dinner to coincide with the English people pretending to be Dutch people who might or might not murder one another on television. Then I can forget for a while that I'll be having a pumpkin spice donut instead of chocolate with my morning tea tomorrow.
Sunday Verse
The Telling
by Mookie Katigbak
When I tell you that you have an effect
Upon me you may not intend, and you
Ask me to render, not tell,
I think of cities I have been to
And have yet to see, where at some ungodly
Hour, a train slips through unseen tracks,
All grooved wheels and steam pipes
Announcing neither arrival nor departure
But passage, sure and swift as rain after
A dry spell. In the town square, vendors sell
Candied nuts by the glare of gas lights
And the derelict hit-or-miss of prayers
Everyone forgets to follow through.
When a train passes, the makeshift stalls
Allow the ground its procedural
Shiver, then it’s business as usual.
What’s earth-stopping is the howl
Of a train expressly on its way
To not here. It moans a phantom hunger
All the more terrible because unseen
—Hear it?—This is the sound of all
That rifles through us and does not stay.
Everything is in the details; wail of the train
Through tracks unseen, destination
unknown.
When I show you how you and I
Have more hunger than we know
What to do with, I am telling you
Goodbye before you know it.