There’s a sound that the early autumn wind makes through the cottonwoods across the way (all dash and whisper and sway) that is the sound of a faraway whistle caught on a thread of unraveling distance from an old coal train heading west; it is the sound of the last of the Canada geese hefting that famous “V” of themselves skyward on a caterwaul and a song; it is the
You no longer remember when I call. I picture my voice as a hand waving strident outside an opaque window, hope snatching at its ragged edges, while on the other end, you stand with the receiver to your ear, gazing at a dust mote just stirring in the slant of morning light across your kitchen table, a pressed julienne of time. Our conversations are often lively, we talk about Dad or the
The day out my window is drained of hue, washed grey with an arch of clouds carrying the embryo of a storm and a summons to the season that fills me with equal parts longing and grief. Cottonwoods bend and breathe deep and ragged under the wind’s insistent touch. I cannot help wondering what they are saying. I heard today that New Orleans’ live oaks, each with a name recorded in a
He’s a pencil sketch implausibility of a bird, high-stepping it out from the rain-drenched rushes of the pond’s edge, his neck a skinny swoosh you could almost miss, making the parabolic drama of that bill the more startling still. He reacts to some invisible shift in the wind or stirring in the pond-scrabble round his magnified praying-mantis legs, and in remarkable silence, lifts off. Dusky azure wings like the twin
They actually get paid for what they do, busily marking up giant sheets of Post-it and ripping them off to slap on the conveniently broad swathes of bland wall space. We, their captives, mostly play nice, vapid salvos hurled that add nothing much, maybe even depleting the imperiled supply of collective intelligence tidepooling here — eddies of fleeting awareness inevitably washing out on a sea of “can I piggy-back on
Fourteen years this month since she first took note of Capricorn wheeling his ancient cryptogram again and again across winter skies and ushering her child into the world. He never seemed to mind sharing his show with Christmas, probably felt in his younger years a jolly Jesus-camaraderie, a knowing unalloyed by age and sophistication that his coming too was heralded by all the glitter and fanfare of late November on.
