“Oh, there are moments in men’s mortal years
when for an instant that which has lain beyond our
drenches on a sudden found in things of smallest
compass, and we hold the unbounded shut in one
small space, and worlds within the hollow of our hand...”
Henry Bernard Carpenter
The man watched orange-hued winter leaves
floating in the unsettled wind. It was that
time of year when the leaves, trying fright-
fully to exist, like elderly men like him,
hung desperately to gnarled limbs, or high-
way signs.
In his youth, he breathed the sweet perfumed
fragrance of tender years and wildflowers
and listened to songbirds singing, they being
freed from servile hands of coldness and
discontentment like old men.
But in these wounded hours of another cold
winter, he found himself bound to the sight
of falling stars and the devil’s icy hands that
turned meadows into an icy grayish-white,
like the wings of fallen angels.
His mind contained memories of those
things, of which some speak and others
speak not, and others see, and some see not,
opening up the depths of his loneliness. The
hollow echoing of his lonely mind, which he
alone had to bear, weighed heavily upon the
dark hours and brought him dreams of death.
His withered doubts merged with the
season’s coldness, descending into the
senselessness of the icy season’s mono-logue,
confusing his mind and causing it to dwell
on the melancholy of the cold season.
He saw broken hours filled with forgotten
memories scattered in obscurity, and his
crumpled thoughts failed to recognize the
essence of his reality.
He was lost in murmuring heartbeats and
retched sounds of his withering thoughts,
which those in the public world, and philos-
ophers pretended not to recognize, but it
didn’t matter, not anymore, anyway.
His aging mind was suddenly distracted with
feelings of winter’s sorrows. A raven, shin-
ing in its ebony blackness, had no address,
due to the darkness of the night. It flew
away, leaving even darker thoughts in the wind,
and his mind.
Cold fears crawled across his mind, search-
ing for places that contained warm memo-
ries. All the small unimportant things in his
life reverberated inside his brain, causing an
eerie melancholy. Then, an image of an
abandoned cemetery emerged in his mind,
and he saw his name etched on the broken
face of a tombstone. He saw a ghost atop his
tombstone dancing on his forgotten memo-
ries, and he wept.
—
James, a retired professor and octogenarian, lives in Santa Ynez, California, USA, with his wife Sandy and a super-intelligent Aussie dog named Scout. He has had five collections of poetry published: The Silent Pond, Ancient Rhythms, LIGHT, Solace Between the Lines, and Serenity, and over 1825 individual poems, 40 short stories, and five novels in scores of national and international literary publications. He earned his doctorate from BYU and his BS and MA from California State Polytechnic University, SLO. He was nominated twice for the Best of The Net award and four times for the Pushcart award.