(Sunday, May 16, alone . . .)
in the open house, for sale by owner, my mind floats through doorways and the sad little divider that says this is entry and over there is sordid living room in immaculate disguise and straight ahead is bathroom polished to regal gleam with floral lamp covers and chrome towel rods like exposed and intricate machine parts, ah . . .
while beyond is an old man bent to garden beside his checkerboard lawn, years of time-fade on his shoulders, tending under gaze of cats between one roofless tarp-covered house and a moss-bound garage with gnomes singing, always be drunk, drunk as a consul, drunk as a variable hatter in the outer urban zone, especially on Marshall Street . . .
descending through the green canal of 48th Street, over-bowered by maple trees and blackberries, with a “Don’t dump on Seattle” sign, I find a well-worn little mystery trail I follow like a white rabbit-ass when I come upon a thick vine to which someone has duct-taped a wine bottle, a swing dangling from the grand escape ladder . . .
emerging into one junk-filled yard where every space is laden with boards and tires and tubes and appliances and a van undriveable loaded like a mind in tatters . . .
as Lowman Beach opens with its trinity trees calling come come be by the waters, where families poke around on the temporary spit shaped like a question mark, dog barking at the waves, and the man in his wife’s dress stands on the stone ledge dreaming her back from the dead, keeping her alive by wig and mascara and majorette baton with the long sad expression of so much time left ahead . . .
in through the driftwood cove and what was once a dock pile, what was once a ship hull, what was once a buoy, what was once, what was once . . . all awash in the gorge at my feet . . .
climbing the hillside into Lincoln Park, sliding on the dirt slope, using roots as ropes, I see the land scars, how looking down is looking back is perilous in the silver flare of the water lacking moon and glitter, ancient mother trees both reaching for sky and rising from sea, so much the way the eye lures us towards what we see and what we imagine . . .
back on Fauntleroy an explosion of cars and the Kenney Home with faces in windows looking out like deportees gazing back on lands to which they’ll never return, perfect grass edged to the precision of a knife blade and pansies so exquisitely worried with inflection and formaldehyde dolor, and beyond the horseshoe driveway the wind vein always points south . . .
in the schoolyard where a child shoots hoops with his shadow through a netless rim some glory breaks through, but to hope is to hope for the wrong thing, and California Street won’t ratchet up the sunlight to more than intermittent radiance, shops and bars in slow Sunday paper page-turning time-fade, café soundtrack voice singing we are all lost in space . . .
as real estate agents collect their sign boards and dogs flop on porches and in spite of mold growing inside the plastic garden cover behind the teriyaki shop say yes, say yes, yes in a dirge in a chorus of wind chimes, we are music, and yes this same sad song plays when time shall this generation waste and these lawns and windows and brief timid blossoms blow on and all things even horrible turn to grace . . .
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Rumpus original art by Nina Semczuk
