From The Request Line: Hayjo Revisted

Bloom of fireworks above a black field, the idle of insects throbbing from the damp ditches. Distant petroleum carnival of light, dark steeples, and a watertower announcing the presence of a town. Is that the rattle of a snare drum from somewhere out in the fields? Tell me again what lives in that place beyond this darkness. The bonfire will signify what again? When it all goes up in flames what is it we’ll be burning?

I like this song, it reminds me of something. I can’t put my finger on it, but it involved, I’m sure, a night just like this. We were in a car, going somewhere else, or perhaps just somewhere.

Somewhere else came later, I suppose. Back then there was only this. Remember? When there was only this? It was never enough. Perhaps that was the problem. You can’t put your finger on it. I love that about you, how you can never seem to put your finger on it, and how badly you would like to put your finger on it. Things, in general, the way they don’t seem quite real to you, within reach. Graspable. The way you’re always saying Hold out hope, as if it could mean the many things it could mean. Not just a clinging to, not just something desperate, but an offering. Something extended. Something shared.

I love these quiet roads, just outside what is our life, that feeling of being lost in a still unfamiliar place, of being plunked down on another planet, looking out with dim longing and dimming wonder at the distant glow of the puzzle that will never be home. Can’t say. That’s another one of yours that I love, as if you mean it, as if there’s some mysterious proscription, as if you honestly cannot say, cannot utter whatever words might explain, whatever words might possibly make a difference.

Because –and this I choose to think and believe– those words are still forming in you, still turning over and lining up in your head, still drilling and taking shape and preparing for the long march up into the light, when they will become, magically, truth, the truth we’re going to need to turn finally and forever away from that dark, still-mysterious planet barely rising across the black, empty fields.