from Capitals and Cranes

Capitals

A husband and wife move about a kitchen, making lunch for themselves. Kids off to school, a surprise reprieve, the house yawns, midwinter. What to do about the furnace, how much for camp this year, and what about the roof? Sitting down to lunch, they eat their sandwiches happily, wonder what silly video to watch for a few minutes. But first a few ads, some excellent deals on HELOCs, and there it is, new roofing sales at HomeDepot! Yes, they think with hunger, renewed clarity. “It’s the roof honey, let’s do the roof,” and she nods “I was thinking that too.” They have given their money to the microphone.

Set the scene, the world, the dream. Sunday: a studied bowl abjures the impulse to recollection for a woman, stands in its long gold bloom, alone, its own jar of air, inviolate and supreme, or so it seemed. How was it this and not that? she thought. Where was the bowl entirely? She lay awake at night scheming how to wrest the bowl from contemplation. Hers. No grace or flight goes finished

All along the western seaboard dams are becoming unstuck by riparian consciousness. Creaks, cracks in the foundation, assumption. The water begins to flow seaward, uninterrupted for the first time in a century. Silver fish fight the fresh riffles upstream. The wetlands rest, recover. The atmospheric river was a well, is. A field of new green rice glistens in the sun, the gathering salt of gathering egrets

Capitals

Now Selling      New Communities      the sign says      driving by
at dusk on the Gulf      the gulf of where       or whom       flamingoes
mingle with the derricks     for awhile      the money will be spent