Overcast

[rejectomorph]

Night draws a veil, fold upon fold, gathered to dim the light, to make the moon an uncertain brightness that moves west while growing ever more vague. The marbled sky is etched by the mulberry twigs which soon will vanish among dense foliage. Cooling house timbers crack like knuckles, the sharp sound snaps the silence which quickly returns, deeper for the interruption. Then it yields once more, for a moment, to the high chirp of a night bird who calls four times, five times, each call fainter as it flies north, to be lost in the forest. Again, silence reclaims the pale world. Hours have passed and not a sound from the frogs. Every breath is dense with dampness, and the silent, sleeping town seems as though it has been drowned in the ghost of a lake and is lost, never to be rediscovered.



Sunday Verse

The Memory

by Gilbert Sorrentino


A smell of apricots that brings a place
to mind. To the eye. Words twist in the air
in tortured anagrams

shards fall into your life
that once had meaning

you think. You are arrested and your face
is brought to bear on all of it. This man

that man. A woman is in it somewhere
for the asking but the apricots overpower
you, the sentences clamor, voices,
voices.

The air shifts, you thought you were
in the street, you are in a room, what room
can it be, it seems familiar, it is full
of a distant smell, sweet and thin
and these anagrams

are falling into patterns, of course you
are in a room, this is a smell of apricots.

They bring a place
to mind. These voices are meaningless,
are tortured problems twisting in air.