August 15th, 9:00 – The river is rising. A raven flies low above the water, scattering the sparrows. Page one – Thirty-two lines of romantic wishes and the second paragraph seems disjointed but maybe that’s my mind, and my coffee is so cold, now Harold sits across from me and watches the sparrows with an artistic eye – 9:15 and thirty-seven seconds – I ask for a raincheck since I don’t really want to go down to see the parade because I have seen clowns and firetrucks all before so there’s nothing new except seeing it on August 15th instead of July 3rd. -- Chapter One is all a bore as one by one the characters discuss how inconsequential they are. And “wouldn’t it be lovely to read something else, something classy?” Those sparrows, Harold, they’re swooping for you down, down, and down like my eyes down the page, pausing only for periods. -- One fine holiday I recall Harold told me he traveled to Rome; there he met a gal named Claire, and so on and so forth with peaches and pears – “But don’t you agree that whenever your eye turns with their wings you lose something in terms of your frame of reference?” --Chapter Two – counting pages until the climax and for Harold to get up and walk away down that golden path, like rivers flow downstream and fatten out at the mouth, he stuffs another bagel down his throat. Ten years ago at the corner of 42nd and King I dropped a picture of my wife down a storm drain. -- there are gators in the sewers with glinting eyes that gnash for real meat and their green flows in with the shadows to disguise them from anything else – then I found she was home with a man named Lumiere. -- 9:42 and twenty-one seconds – I have not moved my eyes “Jacob readjusted his trousers, and paused with his fingers pressed together at the tips before saying that, yes, he was going down to Dover in the fall.” -- But, darling, it’s so simple, so easy to forget and pretend I am watching larks to learn how to fly up and away like Harold, but my head hangs down like broken or wrung and limp and my heart beats hard for the earth beneath my feet and below my bones and blood. “I should be on my way,” said Harold, “I have many famous Romans to meet on the other side of the river.” A museum or a book or a postcard from Gaul from his last trip in the bitter cold? “Just Romans” like that he is up and gone past the sparrows and down the road to follow the river as it flows gently to its death when it becomes the ocean and is no longer the stream of events it once was, but collective memories, rolling forward and falling away as I peer at photographs or play back the records of my mind. Broken notes falling down as the clock hits ten and page thirty-seven – “so sorry, so selfish to think you would wish to dine this evening.” Yes, yes, so so selfish like she said, like I need to hear before trying to let down all these pages that cycle through my vision and ears as I read concerning meaning in life before becoming death and bearing ships across her surface, bound for distant shores where Romans stumble down rocky shorelines to listen in the curls of seashells for memories that drift by like passing sparrows that swoop down and down until there is no more room but to bury their heads beneath the sand to hide from God’s glaring sun. -- And Harold is a speck to me far away on the bridge, one umbrella in thousands steadily falling away in twirls and staggered lines. And I've been looking forward to winter when the water will be frozen over so I will not have to rely on a bridge to cross over to the other side. There will just be a slippery path from here to the far shore, and on the way I can look down at the fish eyes staring up from underneath. -- today, a day long ago, I am a bird watching the sky turn dizzy and shake before coming down in stones the size of cloisters banging hard with echoes against the pavement while I fly away through the clouds – Even if I had to leave I would go somewhere else to read about lives that die by design killed off by commas, not by flickering flames and a sudden burst of blinding light. -- Third grade on February 13th, “Long ago and far away there lived a brave warrior. His steed was proud, His hair was brown, And his sword was named Excalibur.” – Now I walk away from the table, my hands deep in my pockets, against that brackish wind whipping in from the sea, to join the parade as the rain keeps time – pitter, patter, oh, how it doth flatter to hear the conversation of the gods. Page 212 – I read as I walk into the wind – “And so he finally turned away, realizing at last that she would never be able to truly love him since he was the one who had killed her son.” I am a Roman, and Harold is a pagan who sees patterns in the wings of birds. The book is now lost, down in the depths of the city, where it will rest with all these other lives planned out like paintings – -- some time tomorrow or past August 16th – There is a boat waiting to bear me from here to the shores of Avalon, where memory is the wind, and the Romans are listening for the dark ships finally sailing across the deep.