lido delle rose.

Our first morning in Lotzorai, I woke up at 03:30. The bedroom was hot and full of crowing roosters and baying hounds. Whenever it seemed like they might be getting tired, another group of hounds and roosters would start up from one of the other neighboring fields and the room would fill again.

I got up and went into the kitchen but there was nothing in the refrigerator because we hadn't gone shopping yet. I tried sitting on the couch and reading for a while but there were ants everywhere and it was hard to concentrate.

So by 04:59 I'd decided to go to the beach. There was zero light outside. Immediately I almost got hit in the face with a bat. A real bat, an animal. I saw its outline against the moon.

I didn't know where I was going, I just took a right out of the driveway because I knew the beach was that way. So I walked, in total darkness, my feet crunching through the sandy shoulder of the road. There were crowing roosters and baying sheepdogs all around.

After five eggplant black minutes, a puzzlingly narrow horizontal strip of faint orange came into view, and as I got closer I managed to understand that it was the sunrise coming through a dense row of pines at the edge of the beach.

I realized that everything I could see beyond the pines was either water or sky. I walked forward though the pines and then went out on to the beach. Standing there, I looked first right, then left, and at first I couldn't see any birds or animals or people anywhere, just empty boats bobbing on the waves.

+++

and then he said when I cut this string
I want you to go into the other room

conceive there a child whose child
will be eggplant black hairless and high off the ground

when the string groaned and he cut it
when he cut it the string groaned and
he groaned when he cut it the string

everything was real

--Terrill Shepard Soules, from "After Watching The Kremlin Letter"