In the moonlight last night, I sat watching a fat brown toad hop across my patio.

        Here...Disappear...There.

Pudgy little three-toed Buddha...bopping toward my flower garden...where crickets and cicadas sing an all

        night gig on the traditional bark mulch floor.

I like to listen...and think of myself as sitting in the balcony...a place to think with a cool summer drink...or to

        waltz under the stars with a lunar lady.

It’s what I do these days...having caroused with bangled gypsy woman, poets, guitar players, sailormen, and

        hobos who watch curiously from the open doors of boxcars that screech, rattle and roll off through the

        countryside beyond the back roads into the wide, wide...wide open.

Truth be told, work, well, work tires me...I’d rather watch the cirrus sky, or the mountains of cumulus, those

        unconquerable summits rolling golden in the luminous blue altitude.

Yes...oh yes, I am an idler...I have no religion, no ambition actually...nothing I have to look forward to, and

        not one damn thing I need to leave behind. When devout, I am a sun-worshiper...Old Helios, I choose

        you to wish upon... because like me, an old wishing well...you too will disappear.

And what then?...Where will progress be?

Ask yourself...In that blinding flash of explosive solar light...where will go Peking Man, bushwoman, primal

        urge, and the little girl all dinked out in her Sunday best...with her spinning yellow pinwheel?

Where will go the ice-ages, the epochs, the mountains, the dragonfly, stegosaurus, molten core lava-fire, leer

        jet, lima beans, Lisbon, Lima, and Peru?...Adios, Pablo Picasso...Thank you for your insight...

        Arrivederci, Dante...and lovely Beatrice, too...Cheerio, William Shakespeare, or Francis Bacon, or

        whoever you were...We were never formally introduced, but I did receive your letters...Every one of

        them.

Goodbye peanut butter and jelly, pasta, pinball, microwave ovens, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck...Goodbye

        Pluto, Jupiter, Neptune, Venus, Mars...old mythologies...all of them...Goodbye...Earth...moments.

Even in my own days, I see up ahead...Vaguely, but nevertheless, I see that soon my road will bend...and

        become a dusty old back road...And so what of me, my moments, my treasure?...The booty of a

        beggar king, flung about me as I lie at night with the quilt from my chest unfolded...Glitter trinkets of a

        trillion, tiny shining moments.

And what of the earth’s own wine, my woman...our love like evening’s dark sun, orange ooze melting on a

        black horizon?...And then night...and there it is again...one little solar system...Mine, or hers, or yours...

Or the whole shebang...theorized with black ink bound in volumes on level shelves, plumb and square...

        which are the fantasies of trees...which are the fantasies of sod...References...Like the shadow pool

        behind the rotting, moss covered log, unhurried in the salmon stream.

And what of paradox, irony, tangent, icosahedron?...Are they more, or less, or equal to the sum of a single

        Blue-bell ringing...handed to me hand picked in the wild field...withered now within the pages of some

        book of scraps?

Earth moments...our moments...Do they really matter?

They say the knowing lies out in the indigo...further than the deepest inkling...in other words at hand.

And if the farthest reaches are no farther than the flight of laughter...what then?

If the end is in sight...where then lies the source?

        Here...Disappear...There.

Like a fat brown toad, this strange, strange truth

        ...disappears

And is here...We have this

                                                                                               ...moment.