I count my pains like a flock at evening, familiarity is a kind of love. My pleasures are tiny. They line up with the pills they give us at breakfast. I have no idea what difference they are supposed to make. Time is a leash I have pulled at and strained. Now I walk at heel, obedient, well trained. And they turn me loose sometimes. I can go off to sniff and paw where I please. Yesterday’s rain; the smell of dry earth in the heat of a summer’s day eighty years ago; my son’s first steps to the wooden chair by the kitchen door, Anna on the day I bought the metal clasp for her hair that she broke in a week and my grandmother at the window watching the weather and the road, myself appearing on it as a child, spindle thin with newspaper rammed into the toes of my shoes to make them fit. The war: the soldier with the shattered hip crying because he couldn’t sip the bottle held up to his lips, A farmhouse with only two walls, its family in red fragments from the shell that found it like a postman reading an address and the stamping calf still tied to the tree that had been spared, the girl who spread a napkin on the ground and gave herself to her liberators like a picnic. I was an apprentice of life and death, no quicker to learn, no more stupid than the rest. And like all men I have had a real life without knowing hidden in the other. Buried bones. I found one. The wind was booming over my ears tugging at the grass, and a low hill shrugged its shoulder at the sky. The wind passed through me and I knew the question asked and all the wisdom in the hill’s response. Today I walk in time with my master’s step. I sit at the window watching the tremor in my hands. Their loyalty is growing doubtful like my eyes who deserted years ago. Maybe rain before noon. April is contrary. Cars on the road, a grey ribbon winding over the rise a mile or so away. Bare earth fields on one side, oak trees on the other.Birth sign: Libra
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