It's Still Life

23.09.23 (from Hamburg to Koblenz)

08:19
I want a universal mandate that all bathroom fixtures must be the same. At each new hotel, I need to ask him, How do I turn on the shower?

08:50
Rain is no metaphor. It is soberingly wet. It is a thinly veiled image of myself. I managed to turn on the shower. Let it raining.

10:08
I’m stopping to clean the windscreen, he says. The sun has broken through the clouds. He scrubs away insects and mud, as I text a friend about the nature of numbers and the poetic consequences of unwinding a spiral. It’s an interesting old world, and I’m so new in it.

11:36
Have you noticed that German drivers don’t use their car’s horn? Yes, he says. He’s concentrating. This is the stretch of the Autobahn that has 7,000 deaths a year. I can hear a hawk* in the cottonwood trees.

11:37
If that’s the last sound I ever hear, dark is never.

12:13
God’s hands shake the trees. This is colour lacking soberness.

13:04
That’s quite a sight, I say. He makes that quizzical mmmmm sound, as we drive past a nuclear power plant with several cooling towers. And I ask him if he’s ever thrown clay on a potters wheel, and he says, Where’d that come from? I’m looking at those cooling towers, and thinking mmmmm. He should know after 43–years of marriage that I’ve a tendency toward randomness and disjointed thought.

16:01
It’s where the Mosel River meets the Rhine. That’s where we stop tonight. Journey’s head on a pillow.

18.05
Spaghetti Napoli for dinner.

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*Really – the soft top’s down on the car.
The word “shower” is included in today’s journal for RDP, and the image is for Perpetua (although it might not be what she was hoping for). Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Imagery and poems ©Misky 2023.