New Cross & Lewisham Roads

Beth Wolfe wrote, “The wrapper thrown away reveals raw unwrapped today.” 

Today was an unwrapped day, a washed day. A veil of rain, then a veil of sun, brilliant varying clouds, rain skitting from blue sky after the cloud’d already left, clear air on varied architecture.

Antique stores, furniture stores leave brand new tables, sofas, mirrors out on the sidewalk. It rains on the furniture. It rains on the mirrors. On New Cross and Lewisham Roads, no one cares.

Then the sun comes out, and the mirrors glint in the silvery sun and the water evaporates off the tables.

And the garbage: wrappers in the patches of grass next to the train station. Bottles on the bushes in front of the gas station. We think wrappers grow in grass, and bottles grow in bush. (What grows glass, R.A.?) Humans of all races and tongues walk by the bushes and the grass, fertilize them with the light toss of a new wrapper.

Lines from a favorite Wendy Shaffer poem: “lightning fulgurating behind white lace” and “heart packed in bubblewrap.” In one version of the poem goats pull on garbage.

Strangely mute until recently. Pictures and dreams and this island and the Otherworld release tongue from haze.