“The Thing that Filled First” by Doug Bond

You were a lover of views never one for things not meant to be seen, like the forgotten back lots inside dark city blocks. So I held the pen awhile, with that thought in my head, and marveled at the space around my signature, how light the lease papers looked with only one name holding it all down.

Winter comes in through the window I’ve cracked open. I feel the fire escape iron cold in ways I’m not yet used to, everything here notched towards grey, bare and lightless in December just as you are deepening into green on the hills and water bringing blooms and the air full of wet wood.

Those nights we watched winter rains sweeping through the big trees from behind the cover of tall glass windows the noise of it on the other side was the thing that filled first. Even the finest misty rains had their sounds and the beating of water falling from leaves.

I crook my head out over the black lattice fire escape, long strands of clean mounded white, as the back lot fills with a storybook snow covering the tumbledown fencing, garbage cans and spare parts of dismembered cars.

It is silent as it falls and cold inside the emptiness of the single room at my back where later I will write you yet another letter that won’t get sent and little by little the spaces left bare will fill and cover all that I’d left too long go untended.

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Comments

  1. Fine, poetic in its sadness.

  2. Doug, that is just beautiful, everything I look for in writing and story-telling.

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