Idling in Skyland

Sometimes you hardly notice the car in front of you. At other instants, you might notice that the driver's foot's on the brake pedal making his tail lights smolder red, or that the Honda or Ford is sliding ever so slowly backwards toward the front end of your car (or so you think; or is it an illusion, and it's actually you that's slipping — there's that sensation too). You adjust your position accordingly.

Then there are those minutes when, idling, you might glance to your right just as the driver in the car to your right looks to his or her left and there you are staring at one another, momentary awkwardness of a temporary neighbor in the morning, face of someone you have never seen before — and may just never see again. Do you smile at them?

I almost always notice the license plates — certainly the personalized ones. And I see the bumper stickers which are a numerous and revealing. Who will you be voting for next election? Who won't you? Where do your kids go to school? Do you support adoption/abortion/spay/neuter/organic/religious/infinite?

Here's a picture of a license plate I spied in my grocery store parking lot. No idling for this dark night horse; it's owner inside the store shopping for dinner or lunch. Just this turquoise placard illuminated in the chill.

This is where I live. The sky is blue. The sky is pink. The sky is orange, and the clouds are soul sisters to my singing along. The sky gives me permission for all of the above.

Comments

Open Mic, Cafe Babar

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing to certain bards in the back room, entering through the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the fr...

Grit and Sunlight

What springs up: insistence in this persistent mother of mine (still breathing) Even busy ashes from a rescued urn float up reconstituted as morning dew She unfolds her tendril arms from shadow (shaking just five days ago as if in temporary surrender) (that moment when I am less certain of her longevity) this woman ever present (anyone’s mother) aging when even the most spindly clover of her fragile skin captures the sunrise light like anticipation’s shower ...

Protozoa

When we spoke on the phone there were dominant background sounds, crickets here that rhymed with the smoke alarm that went off in your living room and you couldn’t remember the code to shut it down and last night a moment of rain and I lay in bed unsure if I should go outside to set the orange bucket aside from the downpour to maintain the safe house there for the unidentified protozoa, my husband called them, naiant in the unlikely habitat - what I believe tadpoles beside a yard where I have never seen frogs but perhaps it is the sludge cry that I seek the sticky tar paper that lines my lungs and heart cavity weeping impending displacements, my father who may never button up his favorite green shirt again with philodendron etched on fabric nor walk out to the lanai at the back of his house with his third wife and we either joke or pretend we will take him to the beach when we ...

As Mourning Doves Persist

Search This Blog