...So now you know why all those words and many words ago I said, yes, I want to be where you are. Because without you the past overwhelms the present and I no longer know what is mine. Take this old blue cup that has survived so many tumbles and so many tender moments pressed against the lips of people I have known. I used to raise it to my ear, wishing to hear them all come back to me, all the way back to when this cup was nothing but clay. I knew the potter who made it. What beautiful hair she had, her hands a blaze of chemicals and her beautiful hair, miniature shafts of lead and cobalt deposited there. Underneath her cobalt glaze, the clay, it was red. It was from a pit near the river always receding. It grew huge, that red vein with clay enough to fashion whole buildings and wide avenues in a place where no one lives now. That place, it sounds of silent engines, of hounds howling--a pack of wild dogs loping along the ridge.
How hard to see our Queenie, our Ginger, our little puppies in that wild pack up on the ridge; their own pups under the eyes of big birds circling in a smokey sky. How I once liked to smoke cigarette after cigarette, my whole day in an ashtray. And then another, the whole day measured in cups of coffee--dishes in the sink, dishes out of the sink. Now the days are closely metered in minutes and in hours, and nearly everyone gives me something as if for the last time. Well, let it be then. Let someone distill from the drivel of our days something potent. Give me a look, an idea. Not more flowers that have no scent, no smell of wind and rain, of dirt, the earth receiving all that falls down--the withered leaves, our discarded objects and bodies all piled together. When I, he, she, its, our spirit is beyond the regions of suffering, who will be the heir of our only legacy and use our memories to fuel fantastic prayers?