–by d. heidel

I think often of an old house in K—– that got torn down about five years ago (the guy living in it passed away and they said that the guts of the place were falling apart).  There was an antenna propped up on the outside of the place like a boney finger, supported by a desiccated pine trunk, forty or so feet into the air.  I wondered if he had a ham radio.  And, if he did, what did he listen for?  And if he listened, did he ever transmit?  And if he transmitted, then, even as i write this, are his transmissions (or pieces of them) still reflecting back-and-forth, somewhere in the upper atmosphere amidst ice crystals and low-oxygen levels?

I think, too, of a story I read as a child of a radio transmission made by a bomber pilot on his way to Tokyo or the Kuril Islands or somewhere over the great, blue Pacific.  I think of the transmission that he made before he was lost and how that transmission was heard, decades later, through the tubes and circuitry of a homemade radio by a kid in the Bronx or in South Dakota or Southern California.  I can’t remember.  Memory itself loses transmissions over time.

How many of these things are lost?

Where did that book go?

Where are those words?

I turn the compost I am making for our garden and think of the traces of life left there, mixed through the narrow guts of worms, churned into dark, dark loam, lost, re-made, taste the bitter darkness, and keep moving.

Will you linger for a while here?

Or here?