Slipping Away

This week has slipped away.  I wonder where they slip away to, weeks?  Like the spotted horse, appaloosa or pinto, I dreamed about last night, disappearing down a cross-street in some busy city, maybe the cobbled shopping district of Pisa?  Or like a full-rigged sailboat zigzagging off toward the far horizon?  (The flotilla of boats, masts strung with lights, that I remember coming down the Kona Coast on Christmas Eve?)  Like the minnows we tried to catch in our cupped hands, the darting sunspots reflected on floor or bedroom walls my cocker spaniel chased?  Impossible to stop, impossible to quantify or qualify.

Somewhere there is a lake of time where all those slipped-away weeks have collected—vast, meandering, between high blue-hazed mountains.  It looks something like Lake Como, I imagine, and you can sit out on a terrace there and eat grilled lake perch with saffron risotto, or wander in striped espadrilles along it to the villa with the devastatingly orange wall imprinted with the memory of sturdy old shutters, the sleep of centuries, the morning’s waking, opening, barefoot and silver-sparkling, the unlimited day ahead.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Sandbars, Cape Cod