Transparent Things, God-Sized Hole

All transparent things need thunder shirts. The little ghost hanging from an eave, on Underwood Street, a piece of lavender-tinted netting stretched onto a metal frame. The Boston terriers and Chihuahuas patiently wait out storms with their eyes bulging in their special wraparound shirts. My family used to laugh at me sleeping under two down quilts, wearing a wool hat in summer, when I said I was afraid otherwise I would fly up to the ceiling. Once on a sidewalk beside Erie Street around the corner from Underwood where the pointless obsolete tracks run to a dead end on the other side, I found a black and silver rosary, with shining onyx beads, like the ones that you see hanging from the belts of nuns in their habits or priests in their chasubles. I kept it carefully until either I lost it or it got buried in the bottom of a purse abandoned under my bed or in the closet. Clutter keeps me bound to this earth. I told Patti last night that the God-sized hole in me was so big and vacant, voracious and spacious, it was like I was running some kind of desperate toddler’s shape-sorter game, trying to find something that fit to plug into it. I’d stuff anything in there, regardless of whether the shape coincided with the opening. It was like I could look at the sky and attract space junk, broken satellites, spent rocket stages, micrometeoroids, to plug the gap. The wind is its own kind of chaos, sometimes like a sheet of itself tangled or flowing on a celestial clothesline. It needs a weighted blanket. Little red flags on the maple at the corner of Underwood and Erie near the switching yard. Slow-moving locomotives that might be driven by nobody. Flags hold the tree down, mark it, make it know it’s real. Flapping on the flaming maple or falling.