Mirrors of Summer
Mirrors of Summer
The Gemini Season
June 8, 2021
The Mind of God on a Summer Night
The girl has been seen before. She patrols the ramp to the expressway night and day, her mask pulled down, her eyes vacant. She holds out a cup for money but otherwise it’s a redundant march of solipsism; she’s the only one in the world. Her world is the world.
You peek into her universe when you drop a dollar into her cup and though she says “thank you” with a voice fatigued by cigarettes she could as easily be thanking the cement, the wind, the streetlights, and the general deadness of a sweltering summer suffocating in darkness.
She takes the dollar and your car is gone and there is music on the radio and you wonder if she’s 19 but the street has aged her quickly, or if she’s twenty, if she’s twenty-five, if she remembers her age. If she knows it’s your birthday.
You process that she has been there, on the ramp, on the street, in the dark, beneath the sun, amid the snow, the heat, since your last birthday at least.
The year has been harder on her just as every year has been harder on her, you know, as your car is gone and you wish for some radio magic as the expressway has now given way to a busy street and now a side street, hoping that Simon and Garfunkel will sing to you the final few blocks home, giving some chorus to the quiet summer dark and green.
Stars.
The radio doesn’t listen and Paul and Art stay away but they wait for you when you get home. So do the dog and cat, who are happy for your return, happier for the food and how many bullets can one summer swallow? You ask those old hippies to sing such a song instead of wondering about the silence because the bullets are not quiet.
But that’s not your problem. The bullets fly far, far way, near other exits on the expressway but not on yours. They tend to stop near where the lonely girl begs for dollars and never pierce the heat, the calm, the brief reliefs of cool in your part of what’s left over from the spring, the snow and the fall which shape summer’s stones which are the path through the Gemini season.
Twins are the children of June. They are two souls of one heart that see the good and feel the harsh, things are getting better, life has never been harder and it’s so hot that wildfires will burn through October and then there will be rain but not enough rain because there’s not enough water and not enough snow and here we are in the parade of uncounted souls in a circle.
Twins, all of them.
Mirrored marchers into something not past, not future, not now, but not never, either. They stand outside it all. The summer, the heat, and the music that is not heard. --TK
Tuesday, June 8, 2021