Things I Found and Left Where They Were
By Robert Gregory
A slow summer morning:
new light through a veil of green leaves, young leaves
that vibrate and tremble. The shadows are blurred in this light—
shadows once ourselves, they say. Clouds and a girl in
green trousers, three birds on the blacktop confer, between two
buildings a vacant lot, a concrete slab for some old
vanished building surrounded by a few dry rags of grass.
A little local dove in shades of brown and black investigating,
looking for food. A buzzard floating high above the Marriott,
up above the former Happy Meals and a blue discarded shoe.
A splash of bird shit and a splash of old blue paint together
on a picnic table side by side, sea grape in blossom overhead,
long green spikes and tiny blossoms, two fat bees intrigued so
though a breeze from off the ocean pushes them away they
come back and back. Now a girl floats by on skates, a pretty,
haughty face, unwritten on. She flies her naked skin like a
pirate flag, a big tattoo across her shoulder blade. At first
it looked just like a gunshot wound (I saw them sometimes
in the barracks on some ordinary guy in a towel walking
toward the shower). Shrapnel makes all kinds of shapes:
sickle moons and stickmen, twigs and teeth. Bullets always
make a perfect circle (for entry anyway) and make the
same two colors: blue-black and a purple like raspberry sherbet.
Up ahead, a man in a dirty shirt, his eyes turned inward, his hair
and thoughts all scattered, just awake from sleeping in a field
someplace. At every house the dogs come at him roaring,
not just barking as they do to everyone who passes by
but raging and fierce, they really want to tear him open, him
or the things he thinks he's talking to. I'm remembering
as I walk along a ways behind him the ladies in the office
talking about the new widow: Is she cleaning? Yes. The first one,
the questioner, nodded. "Right after Frederick died," she said,
"I got down on my knees and scrubbed that kitchen, places
I had never ever cleaned. For that whole month I did nothing
but scrub that floor." It gets dark here very slowly and gently.
Now the stores are closed and locked. In this window lies
a fat old cat asleep inside the small remaining shadow
underneath an old lost table from elsewhere with graceful
skinny curving legs. As I walk away along the place
with no windows, headlights pick my shadow up and
spread it out along the wall, fatten it and give it wings
for just a second. Then they're gone and it's gone too.
--------
Orthodontists are still insane but at least younger son no longer has braces! At least for the moment...he is going to need them on his lower teeth when his 12-year molars come in fully, but for now they want to leave the lower part alone. I had a nutty time getting him there and back, since his class was over at the high school rehearsing for graduation...picked him up there, took him to the dentist's office, stopped at Borders to get him jelly slugs and took him to Jerry's for lunch since he wanted a cheesesteak...then for dinner we had corn on the cob and s'mores on the new grill that
I had something of a headache from it being a hectic day and my brain was not working well...wrote a boring article on Trek comics in which the comic writer said the same things he said last time, wrote an even more boring article on a dead Trek guest star during which I had a sense of deja vu and discovered only after I posted it that that's because we covered it before -- editor not even bothering to check that we're not recycling the same old garbage, he leaves that to me, and sometimes it's easier just to write the stupid stuff than expend the brainpower to see if there's one iota of original content. The only fun was writing up a brief pair of interviews with George Takei, who is capable of turning anything into a crusade...in this case it was Howard Stern as champion of free speech on par with Roddenberry the idealist, while Shatner remains a villain or at least a comic figure. Then had to watch "11001001" to review Friday since I won't be here Thursday night to watch it...better than I remembered, and Picard so wanted to have a three-way with Riker and his holographic girlfriend. *g*
They sat in the space between the playground fence and the wooden fence separating the schoolyard from the nearest house.
They were clearly suspicious of all the people around, but they sat there munching grass anyway.
Gacked from
[adjective]:
Sexually stunning
'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com
Speaking of birds,
No comments:
Post a Comment