And everything’s lit up in the dusklight, everything yawns like a dusty old lamp. You have to realize how many people are under ground. The towns that are buried in the earth. How many in this country have died? How many mothers in their homes? The owls that fly over—do they know? What father lies beneath you, teaching his son to grill?
I know all this because I can move up and down. I can see. (That’s why I’m building this place.) Can you see the moon? Through the trees.
My dogs are here too. A dog on point in real life is more visceral, is all heaving silent-breathing, rumbling like an idling dragracer.
When I have finished, the two young cousins practicing dives into the swimming pool will not be forgotten. The girls will be enshrined with all the rest, their dives too. No one will forget the way the surface of a pool cracks in sunlight, how like electricity it looks, the shadows and shaking lines of light on the bottom. How nice and cold it is to be underwater.
It will all ring true with the warm feeling of walking into a bicycle shop and finding that the new mechanic is your best friend’s sister. That is what I mean—the rightness of adopted family and the smell of fresh black rubber. The way a wheel spins when it spins the way it’s supposed to. This is what all this is meant to stand for.
I think the summer may be the time for love, with the bright lights shining in the darkness. And the night air comfortable for sitting in and looking up.
Think about plots, and the flowers they grow.
What are angels?
The graffiti, on the back of the door, asks DO FERRIS WHEELS FALL IN LOVE?
Another, below—YES, IN THE WINTER, WHEN THE CHILDREN ARE AWAY.