I am going to speak to you now of Northern Annies cigar made out of Buzz Trout and wind.
It is when she turns her back that it provides the reversal that gives you the memories of many autumns, though now here, years before Captain Red would take George, long before the congregation of prisoners that gathered on the shore line for Lily, it is spring. This chill is not whats to come but what came. Smoke stack waste. The little sticky note on the fridge from 1996, the written reminder in pencil that your student loan was due. I tried to tell you Samuel but you were too busy napping beneath the oak tree in the Salem Commons. And I wish you were here now. I wish you could hear my pleas that my first abidance upon waking is not the sadness that Ben wrote about back in the Age, but regret. It too sleeps in the tools that lie in the basement. The old monkey wrench and the jars of mixed screws and nails and an old Miller High Life can that was left there by the Northern Annie back in 78. That was indeed, The Winter of Seventy Eight, when the snows in April reached up to six feet in some of the old New England Mill towns whose names are now forbidden to be spoken out loud or written on anything but the dirt of the town you ache to name.
Today's bromius is etched into the winds garment and its clap is sleeping in our hearts in its silent retraction. As if after. The leaving. Like the time I stole my sisters pink Huffy and was hit by a car in the October that would define all Octobers and return always when ever she turned her back. So it is today that, April shows us her October. Samuel would burnish in this wind the very stone that he held in his left pocket. He fingered this stone on the shoreline while waiting tenth in line for Lily. And when George became an angel Samuel turned to look. He saw Gull Boy break down and weep. His head bobbed up and down in jagged gurgle sea laps. His face appeared to be beneath a clear rushing stream. Samuel took the stone out of his pocket. The stone that he had carried around for thirty six years and placed it in his mouth and then swallowed. It lodged in his throat and his mouth opened. The strings that dangled from his knees pulled down taught to the earth like piano wire and Northern Annie began to buzz. Samuel's knees where pulled into the frozen sand and his face tilted up to the gray sky as if to release the flies. But none came and he fell back with his arms open. His chest heaved upward once and ceased. If you could have read the etchings in his clothing it would have been the final image: And the bush was not consumed.
Lily was seen yesterday walking down Amsterdam in her former guise: her thick owl glasses and her black pirate skirt. Her hair was down. I turned to run after her and tripped. When I looked up she was gone. I took hold of the parking meter and began to pull and rock; trying to hold back what I could never have, what I could never let go: the desire that changed for ever my love. The steel of the post reminded me again of that brumous day when Samuel opened to the Gods and George became an angel. Rain flew from my chest in a squall of small gray birds.