While no one was watching, he

[trayfnyak]

I'm listening to Our Endless Numbered Days, the new album by Iron & Wine, and I am finding the music as essential as blood, as getting in bed when there's nothing more to be done and closing your eyes and letting it come. I'm listening to the music and my cat is yowling by the window, or he is putting his paw on my shoulder and startling me because I think it is the touch of the Civil War ghost, who signed his letters "S.B." and is still looking for her, barefoot now, whispering what he thinks is poetry but is nothing more than the sound of water moving across a pebble at the bottom of a river. This is music for windy nights at the house of the friend who lived sixteen miles outside of town, surrounded by pecan orchards and guard lights and coyotes in the hills. This is music that makes you stand still and listen and when it's over you remember you have legs and have to balance on them and move them back and forth to get where you seem to need to go, music that comes into the room and finds you sleeping and watches you, smiling, music that knows when you need a cigarette and gives it to you even though you both know it's wrong, music that demands nothing but ends up taking everything and you give it all, insisting.

the cracks in the ceiling they have always been. now