You said, with two slender fingers inside a book, "This is the strangest conversation I have ever had", where was my reserve and where was yours?

Was it because of the season, when the trees seem to be undressed and cleaned bare to their bones, to make clear their clean asymmetrical lines, that impelled us, two strangers, to stand in a bookstore, lower our masks and swap histories?

Or was it the love of suprises, that once made me walk up a small stream two hours north of here, just to watch it press itself out of a cleft of rock, drop after cool drop? Did those words spoken, have the nature of water: to come down as rain and soon become air, leaving almost no visible trace?

All that remains now is the memory of that moment, startling and spearing suddenly a rising fish. And nothing fills the space where you stood by, next to that shelf of architecture books, weaving filatures out of these transitory days and lives.

2002:09:09 07:30 Atlanta
Jocasse is a Cherokee word that means "Place of the Lost".