Sixty or seventy very important caucasians
keep clam in a big architect’s office on a recycled pier over the salty waters of a dying sea.
They say this is the generation that must get it right.
They say we need everyone at the table.
We need chairs. We need placeholders. We need salad forks for everyone.
Are you paper or are you plastic or do you live in your pockets?
Are you a box of formula in your waistband making awkward for the door?
I met D in the park today after a few years wondering about that man in
a plastic garden chair listening to a radio in the warmer seasons as the day turned.
The neighbors are divided.
One of them left a hardbound edition of Walden on a rock beside his encampment.
Another sends email messages from her home office with headings like
African-american gentleman, 40-45 years old, thin build, dark jacket
driving white van slowly down our block right now
2:45 PM southbound.
When I mention this to D his first reaction is hilarity just as I had hoped.
Then he reveals that just the day before some women had jogged past him
around the graceful curving sort of path that made Fredrick Law Olmstead
the landscape theoretician of choice for four or five generations of industrialists
seeking to purchase everlasting testament to the epic scale
of their compassion for the ordinary worker.
A panoramic curve with the shifting vista of a new world coming into view with each next footstep forward.
Just beyond this curve still in earshot the joggers stopped.
“Should we report him?”
“Let’s see if he’s still here in a few days.”
D tells me there are three surfaces.
There is earth. There is wood. There is concrete.
He says he has spent too much time on concrete
and wood is for indoor people.
He is okay with the earth.
An ear is an opening.
Singer, song, and sung to have only their departure in common.
Waving at the gate.