Scattered notes

Dear Dana,

Cold out this morning, but one cricket still managed a sclerotic chirp. I watched parallel furrows form in the clouds to the east, five lines. A large flock of grackles flew across them, accompanied by the usual scattered notes. If I’d snapped a photo at that precise moment, there might’ve been a score someone could play. Instead, I sat thinking how I’d like my own notes to be so lightly anchored to the page: an antidote for all the heaviness our tribe of meaning-makers has inflicted on the world. I am lodged in this body not like a businessman in some motel but like a meteorite at the center of a target its own impact created, glowing for a short time with the heat of its entry. The truth isn’t out there between the stars. The cricket kept chirping in the herb bed, and beyond, the wild rose almost leafless now as the color deepens in its shrinking wrinkled capsules, which are said to heal.