Ghosts flee my soul en masse when I venture onto the North Meadow.

Such a day - frigid, piercing, like a widow's gaze when you ask her whether she murdered her husband by dragging his unconscious form onto the Chesapeake and when it had frozen over dissolving the bones in her bathtub and if she had any recommendations for how to get rid of the hair at that point - reminds one of one's mother.

Such was my attitude at the peak of a callous morning, gazing out onto the poplars and wondering whether this was in fact the fate of a father long lost to the ages. Perhaps the grass heard me, as it whistled past the feet of joggers inundated with their podcasts and their NPR and their Wait Waits Don't Tell Them, and if they heard anything it was only the whisper of a life that led beyond the distractions of some Frankensteined fitness, some existence past the pressures of following the winding paths day in and day out until their salvation of the mind expires in a cacophony of fervor heretofore unknown by even a rural juror. For the mind cannot break when it believes what it buys, I thought to myself as I gracefully tripped on a rock so carefully thrown in the middle of a path as to extinguish my brief career at its sullen height.

But as my mother always said, murder past its statute of limitations is just a way to pass a cocktail party and pass another olive for mother dear's martini, so with a light of her Lucky and a nod to the owl outside, I listened and soon forgot its plaintive lullaby:

What have you done? I like to ask myself

In an accusatory tone on days

When rain taps against sills and spares the glass

And winks at me with ev'ry drop a phrase:

What have you got there? Something you bought with

Piles of pretty pennies? I don't believe

In pennies and I will drown you, but in

The meantime I will send down taps to cleave

Your mind in two and wrest your nerves apart

From a dancing glance to your darting heart.