The Depot

Sparrows tapping your shutters louvres? snow owls guano your eaves? Spring rainstorms sway in your gutters; down-cellar a green pipe pearls and roots find its fissures. Matter—outside us, out in le Vrai, matter—un-does;fatiscit; a sort of eternal breakdown and sloughage. Small wonder that Saturday finds you botanizing some mast-high aisle in the Depot. Fazed by stock-names and numbers, distinctions like drip-forged and molly- and carborundum-steel, or, in DIMENSIONAL LUMBER, the trunk chart. Its dotted lines follow core cuts, mere spindles, out to the perimeter or “wane,” a ring of two-by-twelves with moonrim bark ribbons. Yet even sparrows must nest-mend with worldstuff torn out of somewhere. The joinery-bits in the MASTER JOINER blister-pack point to his fast parataxes—copulas, common- alities, ship-lists, figures in carpets or slimmer hex-keys in sets, the eternal angle (Egyptian) or iron plane-handles tuned to the unheard rumor that joins them. The same slits reparied once with tendon- thread in bone needles, bronze pins, the earliest factory-fittings or the long floating line of the bass-baritone Leporello, his catàlogo of continents and couplings ironizing, admiring, down to the final mel- isma on DOES (you know the Don’s doings) voi . . . sapete, voi . . . sapete . . . quel che FA-AHH, ah-ahh, ah-ahh