Santa Fe

It is the hovering time, moments made to bear defining. Someone should declare when it is night; the dear white ghosts slip down the corridors, wordless, in and out of rooms as if the walls did not exist— and commerce is a strange and other-world imagining fading quite away, just after eight o'clock. Sound is sacrilege, gesture frames the hour. And from the morgue below, the cart is bound for 722; there is no one to weep. There was a prayer a little while ago: "You know, of course, dear lord, I have the promise of my son... that he won't let me die alone up here... and in the dark." ~ Note: A few months before my father died, he expressed the fear that he would "die alone, and in the dark." And it has always haunted me that he did, indeed, have to do that. We, his children were not there.