Last night the sky blossomed with explosions, but they meant nothing and soon died away. Later, bottle rockets, firecrackers. I sat naked in the backyard with a bottle of my own and without fear of observation: I was that invisible. When I looked, even I could not see myself. Ffft. Bang.
Today, the heat continued. I drove into the country to fill a bucket with blueberries and to read the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, a few pages of the Kural. Neither was as blue as the berries, or as sweet, but both reminded me that everything worth saying has already been said and that therefore silence is not failure.
Now the berries are in the icebox, the books on the table beside the bed, but at 2 a.m. it is still too hot to sleep. There is silence at the moment and nakedness everywhere. I am on the porch, waiting for the streetlamps to extinguish themselves, for the berries to burst, for something to blossom.