I am criss-crossing the summer lawns of some suburban neighborhood of my youth. Not exactly though, but through the rush of movement I can make out the basketball net, the schwinn devoured in rust, the rotted 2 x 4s we dragged into the weeds for the treehouse we’d envisioned and, after dinner, abandoned. Stevie’s wandering calico, left behind while his family moved to Ohio, the collected residue of things that had happened which seem so uncertain now in his absence. An empty reflection of light casts a tricky glow from the cat’s eyes, and that old shadow becomes something vital again.
I am not looking for stinkbugs to crush in my hand or for an ant to smolder and curl under the magnified sun. Not chasing/racing/escaping anything. My body moves me through the dream without purpose, the pivots, pistons, coiled springs that maneuver the apparatus of my legs can be traced to same wasteful impulse of a fidget: clicking a pen, smacking your lips, the lazy tapping of any blithe, shifting rhythm. Most lawns are stiff and brittle without water and I imagine that my path across them is weaving a thread through the patchwork plots of land, brown earth and sun-scarred grass the color of hay, drawn tight like the pink pursed lips of a suture.
I may be an adult, or possibly not. Passing by houses like refrigerator boxes, cardboard and vacant. No hinges, circuits, ball-bearings, heating elements, water meters, and no cans of paint thickened with time and exposure. Every house sits on its own little plot, carefully hollowed out with wells which would have dried to dust had the rains receded, had the water gone scarce, had the wells been dug at all.
The whirring current of electrical outlets, framed by plastic wall plates, and neutered by child-safe plugs have never been measured for usage, nor billed to an occupant.
I am weaving through fences, over sidewalks, between arborvides and kicking up blazing mounds of mulch, blurred and brown.
Without wind, the sky is only the idea of a sky. Like the outer edge of a snowglobe, a plastic atmosphere hunched over a few crowded objects, all acting as patient standins for the real world. An entire universe the subdued color of an afterthought, any distinct contrast has been drained down to an uncertain grey. The sky seeps into the earth which swallows the homes which sigh their stale air collapsing as wood creaks bending the nails which quit in relief that the rest would just blanch and dissolve.
