The Wreckage

At the edge of the city the pickerel vomits and dies. The river with its white hair staggers to the sea. My life lay crumpled like a smashed car. Windows barred, ivy, square stone. Lines gather at mouth and at eyes like cracks in a membrane. Eyeballs and tongue spill on the floor in a puddle of yolks and whites. The intact 707 under the clear wave, the sun shining. The playhouse of my grandfather’s mother stands north of the shed: spiders and the dolls’ teacups of dead women. In Ohio the K Mart shrugs; it knows it is going to die. A stone, the closed eye of the dirt. Outside before dawn houses sail up like wrecks from the bottom of the sea. A door clicks; a light opens. If the world is a dream, so is the puffed stomach of Juan, and the rich in Connecticut are dreamers. There are bachelors who live in shacks made of oil cans and broken doors, who stitch their shirts until the cloth disappears under stitches, who collect nails in Ball jars. A trolley car comes out of the elms, the tracks laid through an acre of wheat stubble, slanting downhill. I board it, and cross the field into the new pine.