what's not so strange is the impact on us of those close to us. say my friend sherry, www.pbase.com/wwp/sherry or my friend berta, www.pbase.com/wwp/berta . the truly bizarre is the disappearance of the man at my storage locker, the secretary of the accupuncturist, the seller at the bookstore, the people who give us a sense of community texture without being close friends. www.pbase.com/wwp/trans . stay in one place long enough, watching these gaps open and re-filled, and you begin to believe, as i have this week, 'all men are mortal. wayne is a man. therefore he is mortal.'
here's a passage from the second day of the cloudwatcher diary.
Last night I suffered death dreams. A Flamenco Master in Black handed me a deck of cards and a guitar. He said, "Study them thoroughly." I awaited a ferry on a dark river. Did I have the fee for Charon? Was this the change into something 'rich and strange'?
Last December, Isabella Nigrido, my personal psychic, said, "You were overly impressed with death when you were young." What did she envision? Was it my preacher father performing funerals, or my friend Max, shot down in the street, at home in his glass coffin the day after we played together? Gazing at his painted, waxen eleven-year-old body while old women in black whispered, I tingled with terror and raced from the room.
I seek to make death my friend, to die before I die as the wise advise, yet on this first day of the season I don't want to release the world. Memories of travels this winter - Sri Lankan civil-war road-blocks in the middle of the night - haunt me. Out of nowhere images of a dark street-corner in Madrid and the footsteps of a passerby in Berlin invade my brain. And I don't want to die. In March my friend Amy experienced the death or her twenty-three year-old daughter from cancer. She rose with her daughter's spirit into the next world before plunging back into her own body and she said, "There is no death." I wish I could believe it.
perhaps there are intimations of immortality in the rocks around the lookout, in some of the spirit pictures i've been adding: www.pbase.com/wwp/summer
