yesterday evening

There's a man I've never seen before on the neighbor's porch. He's drinking a beer, reading long sections of the bible about god's punishment into a cell phone. His voice is preachy but muted, and I can't tell if his heart's in the recitation. I wonder who he's talking to--he pauses every minute or so before going on, human sin, flame and more flame. It's deathly hot outside. I'm trying my best not to listen.

I light up a second cigarette, open Czeslaw Milosz's Roadside Dog hoping for a little perspective. Here's what I get:

"To Wash

At the end of his life, a poet thinks: I have plunged into so many of the obsessions and stupid ideas of my epoch! It would be necessary to put me in a bathtub and scrub me till all that dirt was washed away. And yet only because of that dirt could I be a poet of the twentieth century, and perhaps the Good Lord wanted it, so that I was of use to Him."

This is somehow a little comforting. Still there are nights when the world is big and empty, and you're hopelessly tangled up in it.