Our Watery Grave

Suddenly our world falls apart...

Sneaking in on a spontaneous sight-reading of Erik Satie's Trois Gymnopédies during the Thanksgiving weekend. He is back and just when he settles in he is gone. The quietest sound on earth is inside the car once we have dropped him off. I pat him on the shoulder one last time as he leaps from the car at a stop sign outside the engineering building to his four o'clock class. As if that final touch might carry me over through the loneliness, a bridge of sorts. Futility. The hills come and go and fly by. Santa's village, earlier in the day before the seasonal crowds, where not long ago I thought we might find a delight. Then horses. Brush and trees. Cows are black and white bowling pins on a green background all the way to the tree line. A Buddhist temple in the wilderness. Simonton and the curious French mansion. A steakhouse seemingly out of place. The tree farm and horse ranch with what we joke has a fascist statue on horseback. The secret cutoff with the pot-hole road where the cat used to sit on the porch of a dilapidated house. The Danish pump factory. That one sharp curve, where today a truck had under-estimated centrifugal force and was smacked in the face by physics. It is a long and quiet road back, past old old sad Damon and finally the ancient Masonic wooden temple building in Brazoria and then up and around back beyond the river and bayou to our precarious perch. Our watery grave.