Remembering Sylvia Again

A man wearing one green plastic glove knits under an aura of leaves, his legs levered on the trunk. Sunlight on whitewashed brick, the cloud of leaves floats in place over the mimosa’s myriad stems. A helicopter harnesses its hive above us, jaw blank as a catfish mug, silver and eyeless from underneath, the slender tadpole tail a lateral bar like the horizontal element of a cross, ended by a fin. Gone the burden of summer, the brute force, unanswerable. Early apples wait in orchards for Cézanne to return, for an original eye. Every motor a triumph over flatline, silent stall. Shall I go back into the brick, through the brick to a silent room with water spilled on a table, no one to claim it? What a trash to annihilate each decade, her syncopated anger keeping her alive a bit longer, out of the oven. Fairytale ending after all. That giant navy-enamel jar, a sculpture? would murder me if I agreed to slip inside it, stepping on the cement and metal sign at its foot to reach the rim. Sandbugs, lantana, moles invisibly fulfilling their dark orders, the distant limbs swaying above a lawn fed by yesterday’s rain. Scattered on a cement platform, listening to the train, what are the flamboyant cannas telling each other about us? What’s wind but a motor, what’s foliage but a fountain from the earth, each plant growing out around a center, even the cardboard advertisement-tree—reaching. Bitten by this exterior, how can we go in?

Read more from Issue 20.2.