Leaves

by: m. gantee

It’s almost time.

It’s not almost time.

[silence]

[More argumentation, however soft.]

                [silence]

[I look out the window.  Again, darkness.  Again, wind against the pane.  There is the sound of flecks of snow scuttling, scraping, making tiny movement and their accompanying tiny sounds across the cold face of that window.  That one window.  I note this in the darkness of the room.  I note it in a way that is not verbal.  My face is neutral.  And this is the action that, if you were to look in on me, you would see.]

I’ll tell you about a time, a long time ago, when I sat in the loge of the Teatro del V—-.  The air was thick with silence.  Thick.  Heavy.  The silence hanged like ghosts around your shoulders.  It was pregnant with memory, with conviction, with soliloquied love.  In the dim light, the curtains looked like fresh blood.  I sat back into the velvet of my chair and listened.  No one.  Nothing.  I could sit here forever, I said.  And so I took out my pen and wrote that: I could sit here forever.  The air is thick with silence.  Heavy with the ghosts that have lingered here, loved here, laughed…

And on and on I rambled.  And when it was all done, when the words played themselves out onto a page, the visions that I saw (all “no more yielding than a dream”) still flitted at the corners of my eyes but seemed to do so less restively and more playfully.

[I look out the window again and still there is darkness.  Still, the sound of crystalline flakes making momentary contact with the pane.  For a moment, moving across that frigid glass with a blast of wind, making one brief utterance – a musicality of cold in a tiny geometry of ice against the glass.  Look and see with me the complete and utter dark.  Listen to the snowflecks whisper and speak of the coldness through the glass.  Look.  Listen.]

                It is time.

I know.

                Give me your hand.

Brief utterances.  All a dream.