Ruins, remnants

Someone warned of "cheese dreams" if you ate the famous pecorino-coddled pastas. Here I am, the morning like a scrunched-up page, my mental Etch A Sketch stuck with shadows I can't decipher.

The umbrella pines are motionless. Motionless and familiar – the same or a similar species as the trees on the slopes of Devil's Peak and Lion's Head.

It rained today but before we'd gone outside. When we did, the sky was sad, no Mediterranean blue, the kinds of blue I wished I was still swimming in.

I've been thinking about the fall of empires today, wondered what the last day the Romans being in charge was like. Had it rained that morning too? Did the clouds come in like the curtains between acts?

Power can seem so brutally and devastatingly impregnable, so brutally and devastatingly inevitable. The only thing inevitable, though, is its displacement, the tug and pull of it. The longer it lasts, the closer it gets to being usurped.

Even so, some things – of course – remain, haunting the present. Ruins, remnants. Diffuse legacies carved into language, roads and law.