Tom Taylor

I picked up the signs from the day before, from the nightwork of dreaming and rolling about under the covers in the darkness where something occurs you might recognize as sleeping meditation; the signs themselves were the familiar residues of my own lifetime of whatever it was that has pushed along like surf or a mountain slide…. She leaves in time for her appointment and the heater goes on again and the dog sleeps on the floor beside me while the clouds pull away from another sunny day here in paradise where the water flows underground and the food comes in trucks every day and the bank is still full of money and cookies and smiling faces ready to eat you alive and well in the dark days before the fall of man….

So, we’re to say ‘all’s right in the kingdom’ and struggle onward with the day’s chores, pieces to glue and caulk into place on the painted surface in the back room, is it a sculpture of a painting or a collage or a bit of time served among the raw materials of something new and different unrecognized in the passages of time like a tune or a message from the other side of what? There is a quality to this passage that looks like nothing special, yet it comes from an aside which desires only to be expressed and then moves on into the background like a memory or a particular thought you might at first not recognize as ‘what’s this’ and then moving along from the doorway into the room itself avoiding the thought of snow or rain or even fog to cover the sky with its oblique emptiness arriving at the conclusion almost beforehand and yet having no overt conclusion to share with you, that would be an evasion or an occupancy from the nether region where it’s just too much to think about with no end in sight.

My own residues have been left along with whatever I did to pass my time, not like a nostalgia or a warning shot across the bow, but simply an attachment to the finality of simple acts themselves, meditations on a seed or fashion like quietude or solace in the face of infinite indifference from the shooting gallery over who shall live and who shall sink in the mud of the ages caked around your shoes like a weight dragging you against gravity against what, the character of the age in question as too much of not enough for too many for too long begins to make the stone age come back with coleman stoves and designer loincloths with little stash pockets sewed into the lining for the hearts and minds of all included in the restive absolutes we’ve managed to include in the contract for the rest of your life might be more or less that you thought it would be in the morning a smile on the pillow and a piece of candy underneath with a bill for fifty dollars stapled to your chest for surfaces rendered…. But finally, there was no one to find in this forest of dim resolve, slackers looking for gas, beaters and tweakers lining the sides of the road with their tin plates.

“Throughout the recorded history of language the movement of meaning has been from concrete to abstract….” (Barfield) Laid like a trooper in the grasses of the battlefield for the cleaners to pick up and bury in the headlands where the flower will grow into unsuspected trivia and color and design on the florid palisades of the overlook where the dances once took place and the meditating monks gathered to witness the sunrise. You spoke the hours with assurance and calm although the conditions for survival seemed to have diminished again, again, within the clamor of the disagreements and calculations of the period at the end of the sentence where the cool breezes blew in off the ocean carrying fish and butterflies through the cool fog while the sun started pulling at the grass and weeds along the highway to the north where the birds flew.