The Flood

“By and by,” I say, and she understands. She asks what I am doing for the Saturday night, and I say I thought I might spend some time working things out; a little time howling at the moon. She tells me I sound like a big old bear when I do that. We stand in the front yard looking at the first few stars that have appeared on this clear evening. “By and by,” I think, and I wonder what it really means. She tells me she felt love once, but it was some two or three years back and that is all gone now. Tomorrow they are calling for rain and I know it will. The clouds can be sensed in the clarity of the stars tonight. If the earth will be destroyed by fire the next time, I don’t want any part of it. A flood would be much nicer, could wash all of the scum off the street like in “Taxi Driver.” I think I still love her, know what that is to feel it like I do in my heart, or something like that. She questions, writes me off. I can tell in her eyes it hasn’t been the same for some time now. I guess she’s been leaving since the first day she really came. What’s this love that I try to define? She thinks she knows and I do to, and one of us feels it and the other doesn’t, but I don’t know if we could even begin to wrap words around it, if words are even possible. I push down two keys on the piano, two write beside each other – a black and a white. I start the serenade that she got used to, and the one before her, and the one before her, and I play and sing about babies going away, and while I am singing I think of the flood that is coming and about the great big boat. I think of cutting my toenails, and of how many like me will be allowed on the cruise. I think of the cloven-hoofed and dream myself with wings. I could fly off and bring back the first signs of foliage. I could dream of a three month flood. I could think of what life would be without love. I can still feel the phantom in my heart. Two by two they go, and me and something, and the animals I will come to name in time. And it has just started raining and I think, “male and female, but what about the hermaphrodites like me?”