Cora

by Louis E. Bourgeois

 

When she left, there was only a white cup on the sink and a battered cobalt blue St. James Bible on the wobbly three legged kitchen table and an even more abused dog eared paperback of Louis L'Amour's Mustang Man.

The house had no electricity for three days, exactly the number of days it had been since the dog had been fed and since all twenty of the fish died in the algae covered ten gallon aquarium.

I felt large and nameless—I had no friends and no money, yet, I felt strangely comfortable, as if nothing worse could happen to me.

If this is life, I thought, then this life is sacred and must be clung to at all costs—life must be sacred if it is possible to feel this way.

I was not educated in those days, but I knew enough to know that one should lose one's self in the darkest of places-that one should not attach one's self to images and that inactivity is the highest expression of love—

yet, I confess, that's when the pen began moving across the page, when the poems began, and life began to take form…

© 2006 Louis E. Bourgeois