Ultrasound Day

Last night the keepers of this house hashed it out. Not the yelling kind, more the tug of war kind of hashing, in quiet voices, through tear soaked eyes--hours of this. The house listened. The house--over a hundred years old--stood and listened. After a while, we settled at opposite ends of the library table and smoked from a small tin we keep old weed in. Everything became softer and we laughed. The calculator and pages of notes with scratched out figures of our lives scattered across the table between us. We sipped from small glasses of pinapple vodka we've been soaking in a great glass decanter. We walked up the street to buy cigarettes and patchouli oil--uncut 9.95. I used my birthday money. The first cash I've had in months. The air was cold and I have a cold. Throat and ears vibrating with pain--heart light and far away--head like an anvil. It is windy again today, like a fall day. In a half hour I go to the clinic for a breast ultrasound. A followup from a mammogram a few weeks ago. It is windy and I can see women outside my window leaning up against the property wall, their hair is blowing, coats pulled up close to their throats. I opened up the Shambhala to a random page and it said: "In the world there are always possibilities of original purity, because the world is clean to begin with. Dirt never comes first, at all." That's what I read on the page I randomly opened to.