what answers lie in silence?
02 September 2004
8:44 p.m.
I stared at that bridge a long time before I saw the cars--going into Cambridge, towards MIT and the smartest zip code of the country.
It's amazing what the Venetian gold of a sunset can hide.
It hid, for a long while, my thoughts that turned, inexplicably, towards a banjo woman I knew once upon a time, in the bluegrass of a soccer field just after the lightening bugs began to flirt. Her hands, slim and brown, picked out folk tunes that she hummed along with, occassionaly forming a word with lips that appeared chisled from some damp material more closely related to seafoam than clay.
She played for me--for our afternoons of sunlight and brie and chocolate syrup-flavored coffees on the front porch of her house, a field away from my Dickinson-inspired church. She played that night, because the wine we drank made our blood rise to our cheeks and passion surge below, and we were both too shy to stray from our clothes.
As memories of my banjo woman came with the deepening turquoises into midnight purples on the Charles, I saw the swans--four of them reaching and stretching, just being swans, really, but their beauty brought me back to Boston--to what a cloud-captured sunset can hide.