Lights and Shadows

Posted by Joe Deegan (Waterville, ME, United States) on 5 October 2008 in Miscellaneous.

I took this shot inside of a salt mine tour, 300 or so meters underneath the Polish countryside.

Last night was great, as far as times in Martin go.

I walked out of my building into the night with an unlit cigar in my mouth. Finally able to smoke after a few weeks, I was glad to light the stick— a Partagas Serie D No. 4.— on my walk downtown. I only chose it because of the size (about a 40 minute burn), but it turned out to be perfect for the early autumn night. It’s funny. Smoking a cigar is often like getting to know a person, and this one was no different. It started off peppery and dry. I wondered if I had made the wrong choice. Then suddenly, halfway to the band, it started giving me rich, dark flavors of vanilla and cedar leather. I watched a red ember spread across the wrapper, leaving behind delicate gray-white ash. The aftertaste was thin and chocolately. While I finished it, I could smell the fallen maple and beech leaves underfoot.

All the while I continued walking downtown. The windows of the apartment blocks signalled each other. Some were steady yellow and some flashed blue and white. I found myself fascinated by the streetlight falling everywhere onto the sidewalk. Milky orange, staining my skin and the trees and the cars all around, it spread floodlike. The shadows of street signs stretched themselves into so many intersecting urban crop circles. The green of pine trees looked brown.

It made me think about how autumn is my favorite season. Summer and spring are nice, but any autumn only happens once. Leaves give themselves over to the earth with an exquisite senselessness that is at once intricate, dramatic, and entirely unrepeatable. Every day the pattern of autumn changes. We can feel the truth of this, with an increasing sense of our own mortality, as we look out the window some mornings to see which tree has gone bare fastest, which patch of grass was first to evaporate into a burnt offering.

I arrived at my favorite spot, the Múzeum Bar, to have a few beers under a wall of jazz photos. The music there reminded me of a poem I wrote about a year ago for the college’s literary magazine. I’ll end with it:

This pile of atoms I have tried to rebuild into a dream,
rearranging the moments,
in a space of beautiful disconnect
where the blind substance of them
takes shape,
becomes manifest in muddy echoes,
lights swimming in smoke,
disembodied smiles

The walls melt into shadows,
double over on themselves

And somewhere in a distant corner
a voice sings

And a red ember continues
its crusade across brown Connecticut,
mahogany Nicaraguan

(you can almost hear the leaves let go with a sigh
give themselves over to an impossibly delicate ruin)

And Ashes fall, powdery white,
drifting like pieces of you
still burning up in my atmosphere.

The voice, always and everywhere promising nothing
in whispers and sparkles.

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