It is early morning.
Having just made my way over the Tualatin River via that rickety wooden train bridge, my thoughts are cloudy and dark. A weak sun has risen, but the gray grinding clouds conceal that bright Heavenly Orb, its light spreading halfheartedly across this dark land. Tis of little comfort to me.
I’m ambivalent.
I crouch near the railroad bridge. Nearby are the dilapidated run of train tracks, the steel rails wet from the rain. The tracks parallax me well south of the City and deep into the Country of the Ancient Mastodon. In my recent travels, I sometimes believe I hear those Beast’s’ Ancient Calls as their ghosts crisscross the jumble of forest land where those creature apparitions haunt.
I return my gaze back to the tattered sepia photograph I hold in my gloved hand. A photograph of her taken in what seems like a long-ago fantasy of Youthful Vigor.
I smile, and I muse aloud, to wit:
‘Upon a Donutland Dream
Buns rise to greet thee
In Sugar glazed blaspheme
All in a yeasty slipstream’
But I digress.
Hard rain pelts my poncho, making a ‘splat’ reverberation with each drop. My wide-brimmed hat prevents the incessant torrent of cold water from touching her picture. I return her photograph to the leather case, which I insert under my shirt and keep over my heart.
The air is moist with a hint of decay and smells old, contrasting another time when she and I found solace in the warm inviting halls of Donutland, where the fusion of milk, eggs, yeast, and flour produce something beyond the base ingredients as Lovers sometimes do in the heat of a lazy summer afternoon, when undressing lays your souls bare, and you give more than receive.
Or something like that. I’m not a Poet.
I look south. To Donutland. Up ahead on the tracks, I spy the Phantom trains, the caboose moaning softly, the rhythmic “clickty clack” forever calling to us both. All the while a vision of her comes to me, a vision before this time when we answered Love’s call, and heralded Venus rising.
I resume walking, making my way back to the Tualatin Basin to rescue her and, in a way, rescue me from a Life Banal.
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