BOOKS PHANTOM AND SEPTEMBER’S PURPLE PLUMS

An old row of books, and the thought of black iron railings where the full purple plum trees present their bounty in Septembers. The tall rooftops sloping down where later the snow will blow off and wind will carry it around in large ovals until it splashes down on plastic pool coverings and water bags. Behind,- ghosts fly around the night, a night thick with leaves dead, with invisible Pines, with hills, houses where hearths wait inside, with the sounds of that wind all ‘round. The books, they rest upon shelves. Inside stories of adventure, crime, far off lands, treasures, intrigues. All the bricks of the house and the spirit of the departed one, a boy that came and looked for help from the astral plane. I could not help him, and panicked. At times like that

the books hardly help. He motioned to please not be upset, - and then eventually flew out the room, down the stairs, following the contour, which was not really a contour but an L-shaped stairway, - and disappeared right through the front door. How real the spectres, the phantoms, are. How real. Well the ravine is there, and the streets with the air-brakes of buses. Curt and smartly kept boulevards. Everything is the same, but oh so different. And the books- all the same, - but the world is different. A person could remember the plums of September, - or the magic of words, the flickering and flipping of the pages somehow like the flickering of a candle’s flame. Where are the books? Where is the spirit boy?

 

Where is the past?

----------------------------------------------