169. The Ringing in His Ears was Thinking

Broken bits of music through the closed window
as if the muffled sound of bells from inside a jar
the radiators click and clank into warmth

which is a relative to sound

and the room is cold

The night comes early now and the snow
comes early and wet, orange leaves covered
by a cold melting, their orange vibrant in the grey

a white that melts to orange to green

to the wet red brick leading to the house

The story concerned the creation of the past
and the protagonist’s inability to stop creating
his past in ever more detail until he finally

discovered the white bowtie he’d worn at age six

and the crooked smile he’d forgotten he’d once had

Even if you could read these words clearly
you would still believe that they meant something
still believe that they were a guide of some sort

even if only to a single person’s thoughts

even if only in the form of a letter to you

Nights have the character but not the fact of silence
they are quiet enough to allow the sound of his ears
to ring within his head and over everything

the sound of a car driving by, the sound of its return

the cat padding its way nowhere but deliberately so

Writing is a method of preservation, one way to save
the smallest thought from escaping into nothing,
its being better that a few dozen useless thoughts

fly off the page and become lodged in another’s head

than that a single compelling thought be lost

He had driven a night through the slumbering rain
the wet road reflecting the beams of his headlights
back up at him to dispel the notion of darkness

through narrow gauntlets of orange traffic cones

across the barriers of night, barriers of night and rain

Tires sing a song over the wet highway
and he would sing a song along with them
or he would if he could sing but he couldn’t

so he listened to the song of tires

which he thought was the song of whales

After a long time he discovered there are no stories
that he could not explain how he had made it
so many years to some particular location or situation

nothing ever added up to his being where he was

yet he could feel the rain and drink little bits of it

He believed there had to be a story to explain it all
but all he could recall was a large wooden box
that his father had made into a house and

a rope ladder up into a tree, and a red wagon

that he was modifying so he could fly, and he was six

But the wagon hadn’t brought him here, not even
just by rolling downhill which would have taken him
to the shore of the Atlantic Ocean grey and cold as rain

there was simply no story to move him out of that wagon

to move him out of that wagon and to the point of writing this