Prospero's Winds

The trees are dancing, we are sure to be tempest tossed. From the back seat of the taxi, the browning leaves skate through traffic, and plastic bags skirt the eddies. I never notice them, I never notice until a ghost branded with a Safeway logo skips on the breeze past my passenger window. And then there is that moment where the old Salvation Army store has metamorphised into a fast food Thai restaurant, and you realize that the promise of a fixed geography evaporates like the sigh on the window, and the winds are blowing cool and wet off the Pacific, and the sky is swelling and my companion and I are headed towards two seperate beds and two seperate peaces, and I only hope that I make it before the rain comes, as I am without an umbrella.

I like nothing more then to be home when the rain comes to rattle my panes, lick at my cracked kitchen window sash, leaving a bright blossom of mould. I like nothing better than the chatter of water off the tread of tires on Haight Street, and the heavier splash of the eves disgorging their watery burden, and the steady beat of the pipes in the lightwell, ping, beat, ping, beat, ping.

And so I shall draw a bath and shave my legs to the fine, quiet music of the tempest tossed, and I shall raise a glass of reddish plonk to all of tomorrows clean streets and browning leaf, former ghost of a shopping bag clogged gutters. At which point I will curse the brackish water, not having weather proofed my suede shoes.