Consecration

The man in the yellow hard hat, the one with the mask across his nose and mouth, pulls the lever that turns the great arm of the crane up and over and sideways toward the earth; then the wrecking ball dangles crazily, so delicately, like a silver fob loosened from a waistcoat pocket: shocking to see the dust fly up and the timber sail up, then so slowly down, how the summer air bristles with a hundred splinters and the smallest is a splintered flame, for it takes so many lengthening erratic movements to tear away what stands between the sidewalk and the bell tower, where the pigeons now rise in grand indignant waves at such poor timing, such a deaf ear toward the music; in this way the silence between hand and lever is turned into a ragged and sorely lifted wing: the wrecking ball lurches in a narrowing arc until only the dust resists—the rest comes down, story by story, and is hauled off in flatbed trucks. Meanwhile the pedestrians come and go, now and then glancing at their accurate watches. Gradually, the dust becomes the rose light of autumn. But one evening a woman loses her way as she’s swept into a passing wave of commuters and she looks up toward the perfectly empty rectangle now hanging between the rutted mud and the sky. There along the sides of the adjacent building, like a set for a simple elementary school play, like the gestures of the dead in her children’s faces, she sees the flowered paper of her parents’ bedroom, the pink stripes leading up the stairs to the attic, and the outline of the claw- footed bathtub, font of the lost cathedral of childhood.