Little did we know it would descend.



We came home to the flat slab instead of the folded roof and half-black walls we had known. The only verticality left is the chimney, as in the days of old.

In this way a pin is transformed, drivers shove the brakes, the talk about a landmark changes from practical and past-referencing ("just past the burned down house") to speculative and future-based ("what will it be?"). They were giving away a smoke-coated mirror laid on the lawn by the road.

In town, there had been a very tall crane in the process of building a hotel--not quite as tall as the crane--when a money problem stopped the work. The crane had been a pin for months, its pivots attracting eyes as the building's skeleton rose on itself, becoming a larger and larger pin on its way to being one of the city's permanent and notable ones. But now it is a standing lack. And it's said the crane may not be dismantled because it is not profitable to do so. The two of them together--unsettling crane, unfinished hotel--are now a single pin, a not unhappy marriage, both of them all function and empty and obvious.

Everything is raining. A flurry of descent, or sideways movement, and dropoffs making for revelation. The painter is glad to see that the basic forms are bare again, and the weaver thinks that the suddenly longer sightlines are exactly like an alarm going off. It's somehow a relief, the stripping; solid objects made transparent.

The weaver and painter are illuminated by orange leaves. They are confronted and toppled by orange sun on orange trees. There are corridors and edifices made of orange, subversive backgrounds of orange trees, orange lamps and finials. All the light is a slow red bulb coming on and on and on; the days are orange-sweet, set off like topaz. Orange trees surround and rise like buildings; they begin laying an elliptical carpet of themselves at their ankles, at the weaver's ankles, at the painter's eyes.

"There's a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It's part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It's not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign."

~Barack Obama