In 1994, Bukowski died at 73. It’s hard to imagine we have so many days until we don’t. He said don’t die before you’re dead, hold your head under the water, play the violin. Plant tulips in the rain. But don’t write poetry.

How thick the spring felt
when we got home,
the milky night sky implied
a moon, the crickets’
invisible weave
a force field,
‘ode to crackling
grass.’

And in the morning we got up and came down to the den to make coffee. We got under the blankets and lay there with the dog and the cat, the four of us flattened by a knife, the icing on the cake, the tic tock of the clock wafting in and out, the starting of the neighbor’s car, the same low rumble as ours.

And on the way to the lake, the last hanging on of winter, the force of March, crows picking at rubbish, spring birds coming out from the dark…it’s like the aftermath of some riot or looting where it’s unclear what’s happened or who’s in charge, the taking over of songs strung together like tinsel through the trees…the turning of the clocks and the colors so slow, from gray to green, and back to gray, they go.

And the way the rain fell was like it would never stop. No amount of incense I could burn or beer I could drink would make it end. For as much as I tried, it just kept falling.

Categories: musings, writing

Tags: Bukowski, Daylight Savings Time, pacific northwest, postaday, prose, SAD, William Pearse writer