Skoog - Mister Skylight

There are times one ought to charge or fall back. What I win from masking-tape tic-tac-toe on the bedrooms nine windowpanes, I spend in silver, spend in empty hallway. No ones my brother tonight, watering his lawn. So I take my chair to the roof flat as the hour. Wind hangs laundry on the gable. The hour is suitcase and landmine.

The moon rises over the abandoned town like cutlery on the high shelf. Our fishing camp is hip-deep now, at the end of tidal song. Westbank cattle swim to the east bank, and wind turns wood in high cello. Sunset ripens and ruptures. If I were nothing Id be home by now in Hemet, or Anza, or Los Angeles, below the moons IV drip. From the pueblo of the anesthesiologist and soup spoon there is some wandering up.

No one there is my brother watering his lawn, and he calls to see how Im doing. And this is where I start, at Mr. Samuels Tire Shop on St. Claude Avenue. Life must be worth something for the loss of it to hurt so much. Take the foreign policy of weather, palmetto bugs caravanning up the lime tree.

Winds crater power lines, and from these, an empty and alone beauty busters down, bullies the shotgun house, keeps a body up late. Dogs know, the wild ones, wheel-scarred and healed, that the storm brings from hiding to scratch a deaf ear, to sneak short lifelong sneaks brave to live: I know the secret is to stay low, adventure between calendar and heart. Todays hurricane flag only waves in photos. The ocean opens Grand Isle like a casket. We hit the beach late, dimple blanket beside the fishing pier, where children seal, spell with sparklers the Fourth of July. Roman candles fire green artillery into the sea.

Teenagers park, sneak through scrub to beach, and burn driftwood distinctions between lie, lay, lain. My interest is in things that disappear, ten men in dark jackets staring asea, some foreign orchestra. Is that you in the seat ahead of me? Youve never been here before. This frog comes halfway in the open door of Butlers Bar and Restaurant. So it must be frog time. Saturday night scouring levees down into the gutters of Tchoupitoulas.

Then its Sunday and Im at your doorstep. Between Mr. Samuels and the cop garage: water. As a kid, I knew the magic show was a shape of eternity. And somewhere else the desert smells like fresh belts and sweetly tries to take us down. We went to look at what was being forged, a quarrel in the mountains, sketchbook avalanches covering up the world and its passports, any business what the mountain does.

Hostages wash up at the embassy, unharmed. Seven days after the storm those who did not want to leave, or did, find ground in the laughter of loss. When the wind turns along the fence, when the gray horse rounds the turn, blue arguments gnarl podiums of sky. Wind kneels its August februation. The boy with the web painted on his face pursues his thoughts through the vineyard. Endured. Endured.

No one resolves to untie them with massive, piglike hands that hold up sails, lugging together fables of capital and labor in futtock shroud. Knots have names, faces. Knots bear themselves forward. On the Skeleton Coast lie preserved words for help in seven languages in stones above high-tide line, but twelve skeletons lined up, unpronounceable silken words, remain from earlier encounterings. Some knots bob like seals past the breakers. Is the other end tied to something.