part one
There's a certain narrative arc to it, and like in the mythology of rainbows it begins with the opposite of a pot of gold.
In the purgatory of the airport a few of us decide to get drinks--Sophie to encourage her Gravol and me to escape the trappings of a pun.
At the particular bar we choose, a man sits beside us--alone and aged, though not in the way of grandparents. Between our group's conversations about window seats and chewing gum's effectiveness in descent, I notice how the man holds an ebony drinking straw in delicate fingers and how, using it, he pushes the condensation from a nursed drink around on the flat marble bar top--turning the water into paint. I decide that the image he produces, unrecognizable to me, must be the anvil in his mind--the thing that weighs on him, or the thing which keeps him grounded. Grounded, perhaps, as he is now in this airport using his straw as a paintbrush no different than Magritte's. He drinks from the straw, figuratively of course, and the image is pulled nearer to where he needs it, to the tip of his tongue: the translucent, stonewalled place in which everything is not quite remembered, nor forgotten.
As I finish my beer I count the sides of a wet coaster and think of a Mountain Goats song about Dennis Brown--how the lyrics go.
jump: