American in Spain

Yesterday, I was searching through some old spiral-bound notebooks looking for some information I knew I wrote down a few years ago. Before I found what I was looking for, I discovered the strangest little poem scrawled, in my careless handwriting, on a page in the middle of one of the notebooks. I have no recollection at all of writing these words. There is no other poetry in the entire notebook. I also almost never write anything like this. Since the adjacent pages are blank, there’s no way to get a temporal context for when the writing occurred. It’s pretty disjointed and clearly a first draft. I was evidently going through a dark moment when I picked up the pen that day.

Each day, earlier and earlier,
the dark of night sets in

The air moves,
pushed by the sun, they say,
but this breeze comes from a
much darker place

As I wander down this road
that’s leading to somewhere
The world has no warmth for me

The wind whips and flips
and drills down to the bone

And there, where the roads crossed,
I saw you standing, spinning

Hard to tell if the author is addressing another person or a windmill or something. Does the first stanza imply the waning sunlight of Autumn? Could that be a metaphor? Who knows!

So I’ve done the only thing I can do, replace the notebook on the shelf so that this poem will surprise me again in a few years.