Beaches and sunsets are resplendent with their romantic cliché, of smiles and lovers.  But I sat alone, brooding over my absinthe and "The Illustrated Man", dreaming of rocket ships, the old dusts of Mars,  Venusian rains that never, ever stop, and trying very hard to not feel loneliness.

Beyond my book and my denial the great machine of the Earth's Ocean rolled and turned endlessly, green and wild as the drink in my glass and the thoughts in my mind.  I grew older and imagined myself as a shell worn away by the sea until I was transparent.  I watched as the fat-bottomed ostrich people, as distant silhouettes, picked up shells along the shore, and took them home to become forgotten relics of this day, this dusk.

The music in my moved with rhythms of cicadas heard from dark trees behind me.  It hummed and roiled and rattled until the sun was snuffed in angry noise and color.

At length, a beautiful girl walked past, all smiles and youthful sunshine even in that newborn night and upon seeing her I was pulled from my dark reveries into a fresh perspective . . . a new light shone from within.

(thanks to mememolly for her voice)

The machineries of darkness, the expanse of shadow thrown in an alchemy of golden light. Coming up from the soles of my feet and to my inner ear I can feel the gears of the solar system turn on bearings of gravity and inertia. The water before me is a mirror to this strange device in which I exist.

And so I watch the subtle movements of light play across the sky in slow passing colors and I hear the music inside. It overwhelms the hiss of traffic on the nearby road and the sound of motorboats racing hard against the dying light. It is a slow, evolving, pattern of flux and faithful precision. It is the crépuscule implement turning all around me which clothes my spirit in its promise of stars and the coming night.

A Chronicle Of Lost Sunsets: Crépuscule Implement

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"I say nothing but I hear everything
In my building"

The upstairs neighbors' bed growns in mid-fuck
A firetruck streams past in the street below
The tree loses its burden of snow and pulls leaves from earth, air, and sunlight
The billboard outside shifts from a message from God to a plea to gamble on riveroats
A bum screams his madness to no one and everyone
From the tree a bird taunts the cat in my window
I make another pot of Yrgacheffe

This one is a domestic dusk taking shape from my front window of my downtown Rock Island cage . . .

A Chronicle Of Lost Sunsets: Ghost Imprisoned By Cells

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A fusion-fired power station 93 million miles away slips behind a coal-fired power station five miles away.  I can hear the droning generators from the fields, but the sun says little.

A mosquito dines on me as the car cools in the evening air.

A Chronicle Of Lost Sunsets: Economy Of The Absolute

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It is taken for granted.  It is as unique and beautiful as a diamond, as fleeting as a snowflake held in the palm of your hand.  Once it passes it passes forever.  We forget to see the beauty.  We are distracted with traffic, cell phones, TV, the internet.  Our windows are shuttered.  The night is coming.

Friday night April 20, 2007, on a gravel road east of New Boston, Illinois, I captured my first sunset for this project.  Pickup trucks with country folk wondered what I was up to as they drove past my parked car on the shoulder of Bluff Road.

My camera silently drew in the light, the shadows, the subtle shifting of colors, and I sipped my coffee and felt the spring evening chill settle over the land and me like a dewey blanket.

The camera's battery was running low, so I limited the moments.  Five minutes . . . all the more precious, now all the more rare.

Three days later my synthesizers whirred to life and music was written and performed especially for the secret light, the day now dead and buried below the horizon.

I call the assembled work "in phantom" for no other reason than the two words conjure the impression I wish to convey and the sounds I heard on that lonely highway at dusk.  It is the first chapter in my Chronicle Of Lost Sunsets.  Enjoy.

A Chronicle of Lost Sunsets: In Phantom

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I just upped an edit from the title piece for the two track Song Of The Dead EP. 

The full EP downlowdable for free at http://www.blueinfinite.com/sod.php