The Delta Parade

Everything stops. A fat man on his way to Baltimore smokes for three hours in the club car. The porter slips out and calls his wife, he has one dime left and he’s almost yelling. Somewhere south of York, she thinks he said. The funeral procession leaves its lights on and out of this pure stubbornness its batteries go dead. The bank robber leans on his horn in desperation while his partner snaps the rubber bands around the money. A band, you can hear it up the river, first like the new heart of the child on your lap, then like an old moon pulsing below your nails, or something softly moving through your arms and throat. Here, press here, not just drums. A clown is throwing caramels at the porch rails, balloons are exploding or sailing up the river. The lucky trees, to be able to stand that close. If we talk too much, we’ll surely miss it. And at the still center of summer it starts; cowboys ride out out of another life, old cars get up from the dead and dance like cripples hired out for a tent meeting. Up and down the sidewalk, the town sucks in its breath like a girl taking short gasps just above her trumpet, or a fire engine’s horn, heaving like a drowned man or a heat wave slapping against the water tower, this afternoon just like a parade. The sore-footed ponies are loaded down with flags and the library float says “Immortal Shakespeare,” says it with carnations and the hides of roses, says it with a jester and a princess wearing wings. And she stutters, but no one cares or can hear her. Except for the man on the unicycle who tips his top hat to the crowd, who swears he will follow her anywhere, who follows the mayor and the city council, who follows the tap dancing class and the Future Farmers, the Lions Club and the Veterans of Foreign Wars; who clasps a carnation between his teeth and sways back and forth like a broken clock. And then things begin again, a car follows the man on the unicycle and suddenly it’s just another car, a pair of dice dangling from the rearview mirror, a woman giving her breast to a child and another child carefully peeling a crayon, then slowly giving the peels to his grandmother, who opens the big brass clasps of her pocketbook and lets the bright curls drop slowly to the bottom like confetti or a boy’s first haircut. Like a first yellow leaf that fell when we weren’t looking. Because it’s summer. Like a smooth yellow pebble that is rubbing and rubbing in the new left boot of the drummer, that someone skimmed on the river exactly at three o’clock. Not out of anger or of boredom this time, but as if it could almost wear wings.