Fall

Fall.  Fall, I say.  She doesn’t.  She stays perched on her branch.  Fall, I say.  She does not.  This ritual —  the repetition is liturgical.  A call and response in absentia.  There is no rejoinder.  There is no: and also with you.  There is only silence and the absence in her eyes.  Fall, I say again.  She looks down where I stand.  She looks away into the distance.  I look.  I see what she sees.  Nothing there.  Fall, I say.  She’s like an unhinged censer rolling away down a transept.  Fall, I say.  And she jumps.  I turn.  I step away.

“You have to be willing to look stupid, to stumble down unproductive paths, and to endure bad afternoons when all your ideas are flat and sterile and derivative. If you don’t take yourself too seriously, you’ll bounce back from these lulls and be ready for the music’s next visit.”

— George Meyer