In Praise of Idleness

For the second time this week I've watched snow fall at sunrise, dawn arrive on a breeze (the way I think it always does). I don't know which, time or the weather, woke me, charmed me out of a dream where a few of us floated around, gravity's jokers, face-up in the quiet water and the jetsam of a slow life. I had one line that I'd saved and let it go as though it were mine, calling for “Darker days and brighter gods!” Then I only had my waking instant, but it opened with that same shadowless light, a sense of change, of something both near and remote, first and last, blowing with the wind and snow through my reflection in the window. And then I lost it. So here I am, with cigarettes and cold coffee, an unfinished ode to idleness, cobwebs in high places, a spider that rappels down the bookshelves, and a commotion recollected in tranquility; sunlight pouring through, and another bright page with a peculiar darkness flowing over it — shadows of heatwaves from the radiator, or my thoughts going up in smoke. The glass, when misted over, reminds me of store windows, how they're swathed with soap, shrouded in secrecy before a grand opening or after an ignominious closing. Either way, not very interesting except, perhaps, when the grafitti, the anonymous messages appear scrawled across them by some child of the air, words you can see through or a clear smear. And at twilight I'm still here, the same place, the same light. Nothing to do but move with the view: snow, wind over soft ruins, unfinished buildings that loom like monuments to a spent curiosity. I'm in the tallest, up here with the Nopes roosting on soggy flunkgirders. Want a cigarette? Nope. Got a match? Nope. See any alternative to solipsism? Nope. Hedonism? Nope. Sloppy stoicism? Nope. Did you know that Maryland has no natural but only man-made lakes? Nope. The creatures of idleness are pure speculation. They follow the weather, shadow the wind, fill in the blanks. Some are big and clumsy and sly and like to lick my watch; others, like gerunds, have already drunk themselves into a state of being. Another, with time on his hands and the sense of how windows are both inside and outside a place, stands there watching his silhouette change to a reflection as the light shifts and he moves forward or back, plays like a god stepping in and out of himself, and hears the wind as the breath of change when the last flurry whirls away in the light. The last flake grows larger