A street slopes downhill, an acute drop, forcing me to
govern my stride. (Maybe this isn’t my town, after all.) The kind of
second-story flats people wind up letting after they’ve suffered a few
disappointments. Trees built of heavy stones, pale and papery skin molting. A
moment before evening when sky and pavement equal water, when a bird and wire
equal water. Everything singular, like the numbing aspect of a lamp’s worldly
crown. I’d sat with a friend at a spot where every third table accommodated a
plate for a diner—she and I the only pair. Silverware on poor china there, and
there, as an orchestra built of the same instrument. What she’d been saying, my
friend, her pattern of stress. (“Maybe this isn’t my town, after all.”) The
electricity, on credit, that animates an entire grid. Assumptions of utility
and wastefulness—the way some guidance plays to the empty theatre of a wide
intersection. An illness weakens a handshake; an illness within a handshake;
the handshake equals water. February will end in a while, I don’t know who I’ll
be in March, maybe afraid.
