31

There is so much blindness and ingratitude and damned folly in it. Your life will be difficult for a while, a friend says; enjoy it. When I say the Alzheimer's was a gift, faces bunch up. A student obsessed with tornadoes refers to the “rain shadow” over the mountains. It begins in the forehead, settling down to the chin, filling gaps with its gravity. At half-time Katy Perry sang about feeling like a plastic bag. In such wind we flutter like artificial leaves, see the foot of a wall-eyed man walking in the road, kicking at the bag's imagined weight. Negative capability is flour sifted, drizzling the parking lot; as music blares, a cop sits on a pole looking down. What he sees is pattern: metallic blues and reds on a black surface. Pattern is comfort and thief, warm blanket around a stolen book.

--6 February 2015