Dream an Emptiness

The faint trace though undergrowth was once a road to somewhere, to their place. It was a small village then. The people left and never returned along that passage by the homestead at Covey Hill, past the old schoolhouse, its loose clapboard walls still standing, a sapling grown from the crumpled chimney. A schoolhouse yet, in form and storied memory, though a century since books, students or teacher. Marion and Gerald ran with dogs down that lane, laughing and rolling about. Later, at dinner, the story of a previous dinner. George was there with a bottle of father’s Chateau Laffitte. Torchlight flickered over the murmurs of Indo European, a toast to Egeria on the eve of her departure. She of the peregrinatio, a story known only from the torn scrap of a letter. A pilgrim himself, George put down that evening in words unfinished, having already begun, we know now, his own departure, the absence without leaving, his delirium of the I gone but he still there. Walk that path. At the river, sit in meaningless sunlight, stare at the water. Calm, doe-like, watch and wait for the day to go your way. Oh, Golden Fish! Speak to me, quotidian world.