it was a silver dayone of those rare days when silver supersedes gold it wafts its colouring goes between dull gunmetal grey to the vibrance of a grandmothers patient and painstakingly polished silver

beside him ran a runlet of rainwater

it hurried between an eroded edge of a tarmacked road and its earthen shoulder 

submerged in it were sensual banks of sand and silt and mixed-in organic matter 

lengths of it were clogged by stones tumbled and stolen by the downpour

the rainwater ran in a trough of its own creationa trough that wiggled its way like a drunken man head pitched forward who suffered the inertia of the descending hill and who only braked when he stumbled falling onto his hands and knees catching himself saving himself from smashing his face the clear water snatched bits of the tippling sunlight strongarmed and wrestled them to form bullion bars and brightcoins weave delicate splits and bang-out careless shards

the runoff reminded him 
                  it reminded him of when he was a boy in the city walking along curbs  above their rushing street gutters  he would drop a twig or curled leaf into the rainwater and imagine they were an Indian birchbark canoe and he inside  he paddled them across fat pools the while anxious to avoid their suddenappearing slurping vortexes  then he stroked and steered his way among the shallows over their rolling swells and fast whitewater and just before the canoe tipped up on its nose and was gobbled by iron storm-grates he saw himself leap awkwardly to safety and clutch and swing dangerously from overhanging tree limbs or sturdy brush  then pantinghis eyes bright and full of nonsense hed run back up the street to find another vessel and begin anew another mad river adventure

now  he could fathom no reason why he shouldnt play againbeing older or a man was no difference to the boy he carried inside him

so he found a twig

he walked back up the street  a street halfway across the continent from where he grew up

and into the fast water he dropped it and began a new – old imagining

he played better than a halfhour

and because this street hadnt curbs or storm drains his raucous journeys ended when the river emptied into a side street and the water spread out and up and down and flat and calm  he tipped out of the canoe into the simmering and swam easily to shore to begin again

                              as he did as a boy in the last century

the manchild and the boy are separated only by a thin gulf of Time  rescued again and again and again by the happy happy self-absorption of Memory

Memory that can leap that can fly that can impossibly hover in the sky like the comic book Superman his parents took from him   and thought they destroyed 

        

after 1300,  Monday,  9  1. 17

1550,  Twosday,  10  1. 17

Look! Up in the sky . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2l4bz1FT8U  or  The Cramps  Garbage Man  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVLpaiH2hbQ