Читать книгу Other Seasons - Harold J. Recinos - Страница 7

I was walking on a quiet day thinking

of a lost key listening to Mourning Doves

announce the rising light with song. I could

smell a faint touch of perfume on the lady

with long black hair in a white dress walking

in front of me waking me up. I decided to

stroll long enough to remember the whereabouts

of the key to the apartment with heckling grey

radiators in the building none of the neighbors

liked. I walked by St. John’s Chrysostom Church

wondering what not keeping the Sabbath had to

do with this lost key and decided to wander in to

light a few candles. I sat in the third pew for a few

moments listening to a priest who happened to sing,

hoping my crowded head would remember this of all

things. I wanted to grow old with that key, have it

unlock my Eden whenever needed for a taste of peace,

and let it store sweet memories in rooms I alone would

enter. no matter how hard I thought the key did

not come back to me, I cried for ancient tongues

to speak the secret of lost objects, and kept walking

around like a child in search of Jerusalem in the Bronx

for the tiny little opener with a red dot on it that

would open my mother’s apartment door—home

to me. I still foolishly yearn to find it in a sidewalk

crack, beneath an old cushion at church, on an altar

in a grocery store with plastic Saints, or in the pocket

of the last domino player on the block who will say

I found it!