Days Pending

Days Pending

August 29, 2001

jp melville

Bolt of lightning.

Thunder.

Rain.

A second bolt of lightning.

Crack of thunder.

Electricity goes off.

Just a few days here now.

In this heat wasted subsea plain off the Caspian Sea.

Electricity off no longer surprises me.

I welcome the darkness.

I hail from a world where technology works.

Where we have forgotten soothing spaces between the human.

I welcome the cool air damper, closer, richer in my nostrils.

I listen without electric light, without candle.

A silence not heard for a very long time.

But a piano?

I hear a piano being played.

Minor chords and melancholy.

I stand step softly to a window to peer into nightness.

I catch a glimpse of candlelight flickering in a house two walls over.

Someone playing piano keys tender touching melancholy.

The music washes through gentle rain.

Abandoned a decade Soviet Union gone.

A once upon a time with no tomorrow.

In grey light I see moss grows green on rooftops.  Walls around the houses chipped, some cracked, paint long faded with time.  Yards barren excepting rusting metal, perhaps a barrel, perhaps a pipe, a few rickety wooden pens for chickens.  Flocks of sheep in the streets.  Bits of bent wire holding up leaning gates.  Cannabalized hot water tanks useless with neither gas nor electricity now turned feeding troughs for cattle.  Wending slowly by the housefront, a rattling shadow old tractor, belching, not even a headlight, the driver knowing the streets in darkness, dragging along a leaking tank on wobbling wheels, vending drinking water for pennies.  World of subsistence and survival.

And still the piano plays.

Only days pending before all things change.