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August Storm Clouds and An Unexpected Serenade





Begin with the sounds of my husband in the kitchen pouring freshly boiled water through a beige paper filter that folds over and hisses just the tiniest bit in the insignificant mishap. He yelps like he does to himself, and even from two rooms removed it irritates me like he’s a person touched and unstable, and I get up and shut the door to my study and pretend I don’t know him and am anywhere else where the coffee is dripping perfectly or waiting for the lightest press of palm against top against spring, against ebony grounds, and an aroma of pungent perfection is squeezed heavenward;

Start again. The full, running water in the bathroom where our daughter showers, the most Olympic shower in the history of twenty-one-year old girls, like swimming the length of two oceans to achieve both cleanliness and a certain sheen of muscular endurance raising her arms to lather and rinse, lather and rinse again; straining the patient endurance of her parents who, when the utility bill arrives a month later, try to remember who last visited or was it a dry month and the trees needed dousing?

Here the the dog we named Butterfly. She is old now and wades into a puddle of still, evaporating water, wanting to lick it up directly from the dusty cement porch after the night’s rainstorm that seemed as though it might lift our house, as if tilted toward Oz for the ferocity of the sideways throb of baritone and invisible seams ripping; I lay half awake very late hoping that the skylights wouldn’t burst;

Remember the night before standing in the cool air path at the bottom of six stairs from this downtown Mercado. I am waiting for my husband and daughter to decide whether we are stepping out for movie or dinner, or both, and if so whether it will be comic book villains or story of a young man with a heritage he must hide, and suddenly as if from a passing car on San Francisco Street, a mandolin is playing and I tip my head out and around the adobe post blocking my view to see the musician, busker with heavy height and round face like a young nephew. For all my anticipation, a personal, unexpected serenade.

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