QUOTABLE
Words are my only evidence that I have a shadow in this world. Only with a commitment to notebook and pen, early mornings in cold leather-backed chairs or empty dining room tables - and opening my senses - am I able to coax them out.
Everthing fell quiet at the four o’clock hour when the TV left playing was switched off. At once, the dogs stopped stirring and the wind that had been shooting sleet into the windows was stilled. This chorus of sudden silence was perfectly timed as a distant freight train gave two loud, dawn-breaking screams at the town’s main intersection. (more…)
Home building has stalled according to national news reports and confirmation to the fact can be found with a look out our kitchen window.
Construction on the second phase of the Genesis Creek housing development began in 2006 in the pasture behind our house. The land was leveled, the trees were cleared and the quiet backcountry prairie was replaced with an immense brown field with fresh asphalt in the shape of two cul-de-sacs and one long neighborhood street poured down its middle. (more…)
Shrouded in fog, the houses lit by porch lights draw together at dawn, turning the streets into alleys for the neighborhood pets to move through in misty apparitions.
This was the scenery the previous morning, too – visibility suddenly shrunken, houses down the long street hidden behind the clouds and the block suddenly ended. The windows in parked cars steamed as though by breath but in actuality a symptom of the cool glass against even cooler temperatures. Eventually, the clouded windows beaded as the morning deepened and then evaporated in direct sunlight. (more…)
Rumbling track and train whistles carry in on the fall breeze, over the shingled roof and the flag waving beneath me on the front porch. The sun that I’ve written so much about the last few days is the perfect warmth and, as much as I can, I bask in it, feet up on the wooden window sill, the cat playing with strings at the foot of the bed, the trees mostly green but ready to ripen and turn.
The mailbox posts leave deep shadows into the streets. Almost-too-lazy-to-live dandelions poke up in yards that were mowed days ago, and even they have given up on summer. Children play in bedrooms and carry toys from room to room. Their sweet laughter and voices aren’t that dissimilar to bird song on this morning that the even the most cynical part of me would describe as glorious. (more…)
The paint flakes on the white-washed railing around the frontporch. A pair of flower baskets loaded with dirt and geraniums overflow – purple petals lie scattered on the slatted floor in the spaces between boards. Sometime in the night or perhaps the lazy day a spider has woven a web across the porch swing and as I look out on the parched August grass, I wonder if there is any view more American than this one.
Down the street past the stop sign’ a farmer with a potbelly unloads a tractor from the trailer he pulled behing the giant extended-cab truck parked in the street. He starts the engine, which pierces the soft afternoon rustling of leaves by the steady wind and drives it up the slanted driveway to an opwn garage door. He leaves it there and climbs back in the pick-up to the sounds of American flags beating in the wind. (more…)
TITLE: Siddhartha
AUTHOR: Hermann Hesse
TITLE: Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 19441990
AUTHOR: Charles Bukowski
913-314-2201
Kansas City, Missouri
kevin@kevinkuzma.com
Copyright © 2010 KevinKuzma.com
Site by Seven Places Productions
Photography by Aaron Lindberg
