You’ve been here before. Pause to light your pipe — today, an odd combination of Hap O’ the Wynd and Orlick Flat Cut, both wakeful and soothing as well as peppery and strongly aromatic — take a sip of coffee and breathe. Tell the dog to quit eating cat shit out of the litter box under the basement stairs. It’s never a question of an absence of language. This has not ever been the problem. If it’s anything, the problem is that there’s too many words rushing and the process is mostly catching every third and fifth word to string something like cohesive thoughts together.

Whether you’re certain or not, believe that the desk forgives you and understands. You’ve been writing on the fly, living in the moments, staying with the current. squeezing minutes into seconds into milliseconds into quantum time along a never-ending event horizon. The desk understands. It’s a rooted and solid thing, as if it grew out of the ground here centuries ago, as if the desk grew into itself and the house was simply built around it. Trust in the wisdom of heavy things. Trust in the wisdom of the air. Trust in the swirl of tobacco smoke and coffee and words and the heart of her that sleeps upstairs.

Sing, John Prine, sing of this old Kentucky home. We’ve been here before. River pebbles get shook loose by the current. After enough years, we become sand. This is the truth that old river captains, old men on the mountains, and the crones hold in the deep crevices in their hands. Jobs and lives ride currents few people bother to understand. At least you bother to try and understand.

The coffee cup is empty and the pipe bowl is full of tobacco ash. These are not permanent states of being, even in this economy. Neither is this. You’ve been here before.