The Witching Hour


he could not stand up in the morning without her.
he was awake now, but he shut his eyes tightly in tense uneasiness.
he did not want to be awake.
he moved his body like one fighting for breath, underwater, all the while knowing
he could not be saved.

in the dark he had her, and it was as sweet as life had been years ago.
how simple it had been, to pass the hours circling round the dinning table, silent,
day-dreaming all along, his mother telling him to quit because that would make him sick.
maybe it did.
he thought about Richard Brautigan and his word that had been so true to him.

the women in his life were after all just like doors, as he once wrote and,
hinged to forgetfulness, they all managed somehow to close
out of sight, the women he loved, gone forever.
he tried also to remember what Saul Bellow wrote about the ghost-hour
but he could not.

there was supposed to be a time of day when demons and ghosts
would appear to haunt us, around midnight they say, at their most powerful manner.
for him that always happened in the morning.
here, still in bed, still half-delirious, he once again had to confront his own ghosts.
they drowned his weak mind in the deep river of memories, pictures of her
that he could not let go.

waves crashed against the back of his head like the ocean did against the Great Barrier Reef.
he longed for the day he would see her again, if that was ever to come.
but Time, as the story of The Fly goes, is a great healer, vanquisher of all the griefs and sorrows of man.
years would pass to ease the wound like lullabies-
and he would at last be lost
from all emotions and memories.