Can you imagine the air filled with smoke?
It was. The city was vanishing before noon
or was it earlier than that? I can't say because
the light came from nowhere and went nowhere.
This was years ago, before you were born, before
your parents met in a bus station downtown.
She'd come on Friday after work all the way
from Toledo, and he'd dressed in his only suit.
Back then we called this a date, some times
a blind date, though they'd written back and forth
for weeks. What actually took place is now lost.
It's become part of the mythology of a family,
the stories told by children around the dinner table.
No, they aren't dead, they're just treated that way,
as objects turned one way and then another
to catch the light, the light overflowing with smoke.
Go back to the beginning, you insist. Why
is the air filled with smoke? Simple. We had work.
Work was something that thrived on fire, that without
fire couldn't catch its breath or hang on for life.
We came out into the morning air, Bernie, Stash,
Williams, and I, it was late March, a new war
was starting up in Asia or closer to home,
one that meant to kill us, but for a moment
the air held still in the gray poplars and elms
undoing their branches. I understood the moon
for the very first time, why it came and went, why
it wasn't there that day to greet the four of us.
Before the bus came a small black bird settled
on the curb, fearless or hurt, and turned its beak up
as though questioning the day. "A baby crow,"
someone said. Your father knelt down on the wet cement,
his lunchbox balanced on one knee and stared quietly
for a long time. "A grackle far from home," he said.
One of the four of us mentioned tenderness,
a word I wasn't used to, so it wasn't me.
The bus must have arrived. I'm not there today.
The windows were soiled. We swayed this way and that
over the railroad tracks, across Woodward Avenue,
heading west, just like the sun, hidden in smoke.
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I didn't have an eventful Tuesday morning -- work and chores -- but it was primary election day, so after lunch we went out to drop off our ballots and to stop at Safeway for a couple of things. Then we came home to take a walk to the park. The smoke was a better today -- at least, we couldn't smell it -- though it was still cooler and more overcast than originally predicted. It's supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow morning, which ought to help clear it out.
My Trek group watched DS9's awesome "In the Hands of the Prophets" (Winn and Bareil!), plus the episode of In Living Color in which Jim Carrey plays Captain Kirk because Paul Wesley channeled him so well in Strange New Worlds this week. Then we saw the end of the Orioles loss to the Phillies and the start of the Mariners victory over the White Sox around dinner. Now we're watching the season finale of The Buccaneers, which remains gloriously over the top.
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