It was December 19th, my thirtieth birthday. I left work early and stopped on the way home for a bottle of champagne and planned on ordering out for dinner to be delivered when Dana got home. I walked into our apartment and noticed something was not right. It took me several moments for me to realize that Dana’s things were gone: family photos and various knick-knacks. My comfort level was starting to drop like the temperature right before a midwestern thunderstorm. I began looking around for anything of her presence: her closet, her drawers, her medicine chest were all empty. Her luggage, the pieces of silver given to us by her family at our wedding, her books; every last trace of her existence had disappeared. I fell into a chair, dazed, stunned, not believing what, I realistically knew to be true. She was gone,

An hour passed before I was able to get up. I went to pour myself a scotch and saw a plain envelope on the counter and opened it:

My new novel, “The Awakening of Russell Henderson”, is now getting a final proof and should be available before Christmas. Will keep you posted.

You appeared to me today.

I saw you as you truly are.

 

I saw you as the energy of life.

You radiate with a presence not physical.

But an aura of color that cannot be defined

by a philospher’s tome.

 

From where do your thoughts derive?

Your body breaks into speech.

From where does that intelligence come?

Can sun shine through you.

As surely does moonlight.

As sunlight through your hair.

 

The mystics have it right. 

Your energy is my life.

I sent my novel off to the publisher a few days ago. It feels like I sent one of my children off to college after raising, nuturing, and cajoling over this last year. But now it’s time for it to stand on its own merit and enter the real world sometime early in 2019. Wish it well.

Night winds howled down from north canyon walls

blowing away sweet dreams from the sleepless 

to some place beyond

• the opium dens of Paris
• the brothels of Bankok
• the underground jazz bars of Kerouac’s San Francisco

where the poets and philosophers rest in a tea stick haze.

 

Do these dreams of meaninglessness 

travel to a far distant ancient Olympus

where grey eyed warrior Athena lives

with her snakes and owl of wisdom?

 

I rest alone in a vast desert of loneliness

in a fragrant copse of piñon and cedar

amongst the snakes and scorpions

who are my only friends and enemies.

 

A full fall equinox moon rises with cold light.

A wildcat screams from across the arroyo.