A eulogy for absolute uniqueness

You glide along the asphalt easily, and you know this moment will never exist again like this. You look up and spy a hawk, and the dulcet tones sliding casually out of your car stereo speakers twine into the golden, invisible rope along which it climbs, still-winged, above the trees, toward the horizon, like an unassuming, inevitable arrow. In fact, you are impelled along your own golden rope, and the sounds you hear are as if coaxed from the friction of your travel through this landscape, this vehicle, through this very body. You recall a movie from your youth of a wonderful and impossible ship being pushed along a string of light with sails of light... but you somehow know you must be here, right at this moment, and you wonder: how did it come to this? And all around: only the smooth tread of tire on terrain, the staccato sun through the trees, and the voluptuous voice of time through the stereo, as though a sigil and only sign of your having passed this place, only once.

You think back now, and try to recall that round and perfect and fractured crystalline now, and you're only smitten by your own inadequacy, and by the lingering gentle kiss of that beautiful now-dead stranger, still wet on your lips.

5 May, 24 June 2003