Shiva
of Basins
Michael
McClintock
South Pasadena, CA, USA
No one claims the rewards of oblivion -- by all they are merely
waited for and always received.
.................this
bright day . . .
.................the empty house
.................of my mother
I came to retrieve papers, a few mementoes, decide what furniture to
keep, what to discard, to turn off the gas and take away the phone.
I did those things and left, troubled.
I drove out to the condor reserve in the Los Padres forest and
watched one of the great birds. How strange her solitary, high
cascading passage through the day. There is in this creature no
willing messiah of restoration or mending. She is a kind of
Shiva, and in her flight you can see the intolerable weariness of
time, in the wing's stroking length and thick feathered blackness,
weary of days and eons of days -- the flying out, the returning, the
feeding and sleeping and rising again.
For half a minute, no more, through the trees, I watch how she lofts
upward, voluminous of wing, snake-headed, then slides down the sky
and into a low glide, out over the basalt palisades, toward the
Mojave basin.
I turn and go, having seen what I needed.
Summer
Heat
Linda
Robeck
Merrimack Valley, MA, USA
I stay home to wait for the electrical inspector. He arrives in a
huge new pickup truck that I hear while it is still a block away. A
big man to match the size of his truck, he walks in like he owns the
place, and makes snide remarks about our housing development, our
landscaping, our neighbors. I try to change the subject. In the next
town a man was just arrested for imprisoning his family and raping
two of his daughters for the past six years. No one even knew there
were children in the house. But it wasn't even a house - it was an
old storefront with plywood in the windows. I had driven past many times and thought the place
abandoned. The inspector says the rapist should be caged in the town
square, so people can poke at him with sticks and break the man's
teeth. He pantomimes it again and again, a small grunt escaping with
each thrust. After he leaves, I lock all the doors.
too shy
to speak to strangers
she hides behind her hair
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