After the heat of the day, the cool evening air and the crystalline clouds. Something had ended in your starred heart. We live without knowing.

These last moments rich in their suggestiveness. The older you become the more time is rolled into a single moment. Memories of previous summers suffuse this instant; your hands are loose and open...

What is there to hold on to?

There is deep silence. An unseen dog barks some streets down and then stops for no reason. A child laughs somewhere. Then from up in the hills you hear a train on the tracks. And then, as the breeze picks up and the leaves rustle, you hear the gentle tingling of wind chimes, a signal of presence. But all these sounds are heard individually and they form no " picture", only a pure succession of isolated notes. They are the faint and ghostly reminders of the life not lived. Nothing on earth remains or will ever remain but these cycles of appearance and disappearance- and yet we still dream of gold.

A drain pipe is illuminated by the last flaring of the sun. The light forms a solid horizontal bar of gold above the stone and the shadows. But before long it too is absorbed in the great samsara.

In my coat pocket I carry my ticket with the printed details of my departure. The stars have never looked so beautiful, the rose never so ephemeral. Everything comes into the summer light in time, for a time. Khayyam saw it, this brief, flashing world: drink, and drink well!