Evening. I monitor the sun’s descent by how the colors change on the buildings faces. The blink of a radio tower, a white blue glittering eye. My face on the window, raked by contrails of jets landing due south. Why has it been so hard to live silently, following the arc of days, faithful to the tasks given and the tasks realized? A compact mass of black wings, birds that look like bees. Silence here, silence over the wires, on the rooftops, waving in the branches, silence knocking on the unquiet heart and Joni sings ‘I wish I had a river, I could skate away on/ But it don’t snow here/ Stays pretty green…’

The sky is now a wash of blue blacks and crimson. Downtown skyscrapers take on a sharper definition as lights come on and as night falls. And lines of Reinaldo Arenas run through my head like stock tape ticker, ‘I run my hands over her keyboard and suddenly it all starts up. / With a tinkling the music begins, and then speeds up more and more.’

And I realize it is time for me to write too.