Those Days in the Middle of the Week

Click on the first picture, then scroll to read:

Those days in the middle of the week, when everyone else is working.

I sit out at the plaza, in the café, by the ridgetop table, and do what I do.

The lifelong adolescence in its way. The barking at the commerce of time.

A staff put out against the current of everything.

Constructing semaphore messages always anxious

they’re invisible.

It is not the baby being pushed across the plaza, the immigrant washing the

café dishes, the growing of squash with water from a drying well.

It’s not anything other than the echo of metaphors

bouncing down the well

reaching cool silence

inaudible.

Yet the repetition of anything builds a mooring eventually,

whether it bothers the tide or not to

abide by the new sinuity

glide the new riffle

make way for

its mass.

Ambition is a sham against the tide.

One that makes its space

by taking it from 

the plaza quiet

with the force

of will. 

Were my arm a scythe, I would reap my own head

that the fountains keep flowing

in the plaza bath or the

drip irrigation lines unbothered

by distortion

distortion distortion.

The baby rolls past the dry fountain

the brown skin shuffles coffee cups

the squash dies when the water 

is diverted

to our cash crops.