Thursday, March 22, 2012

There's an ill wind blowing tonight...


Tis an ill wind that blows warm in March…in Maine.

It carries tidings of war, pestilence and more. It opens a door long closed, a door to a realm not suited for men but a door that beckons to angelic beings looking for lost souls and a glass of wine.

Tis an ill wind that blows warm on Penobscot Bay.

It blows to shore brigantines long sunk, with blood thirsty pirates at the helm, in search of rape, pillage and souls to plunder.

Tis an ill wind that blows warm through the windows of an old route one tavern.

It slithers across a marble bar behind which stands a man in black, a bottle of red in one hand and a book in the other, reading tales to dead pirates, angels and the bringers of war…holding back the tides of a warm March wind.

Tis an ill wind that blows warm in March in Maine

Outside a horse is tethered awaiting it’s rider and I’m just sitting in the corner going along for the ride watching it all unfold.

The man in black he’s got them and the wind under his thumb. He's telling them a story of lost love. Love lost in a wave of unholy rage and darkness, lost in the ancient warrens of a Venetian palazzo. A once in many lifetimes love never again to be risked.

He spins the tale like a banshee and he doesn't move, he lets the words do his work. And as the tears fall from his eyes, his voice weaves a spell of remorse and understanding that holds sway over the assembled mass of soulless beings who in the end weep with him.

They know I'm here but this is their soiree and the wine in my glass keeps being refilled by wispy remnants of ring clad fingers crisscrossed with scars and welts that tell only one tale.

And now the wind is cooling.

As he pours into the assorted gold, bronze and wooden goblets, held out in ever growing supplication, from a bottle that never empties, he glances across the room at me and smiles.

A sound like the songs sung by the angels who guard the dock on heaven's shore reaches my mind and while his lips don't move I know he's singing to me. He's telling me the stories I've never heard, the ones I've always imagined but could never quite conjure.

As the wind fades away so do the vagabonds, one by one, until it's only me and him…and the stories.

I can hear the breath of his horse outside my door, the occasional stamp of an impatient hoof shaking the time worn floor beneath my feet.

Now, two glasses rest on the table before me and as I lose myself in his words and the endless depths of the red nectar in my glass, I'm taken back in time, into the past lives of a man whose feet have trod this earth for seven hundred years.

I see the lives torn asunder in his wake, by those mortals who have and do pursue him and what he guards, by the angelic beings on both sides of the eternal divide some of who toil on only in the darkest hope that one day they may taste his soul, and the lives lost at his hand.

I see it all in a never ending tableau, a parade of darkness and light, pain and torment and the righteous hope of salvation. Someday, some way, all this will end. Until then...the stories, and the wine, flow.

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