Southverve

One from a car window on the MLK Bridge as the rain starts, and she moves, palm up to catch the rain.  Still muggy, still so hot here, but that rain is cooling.  We’re going east.  Below us, the I-71 traffic going north-south.  She keeps moving her fingers up-back like playing a piano upside down.  [...]

At Spring Grove cemetery, the trunk of a sycamore leans out over a pond, ready, it seems, to dive in if only the roots will let go.  The other night at a concert at Seasongood Pavilion in Cincinnati’s Eden Park, I lay under two sycamores with their splotched bark, layer atop layer of leaves, and [...]

On the fourth, I drove to Spencer Overlook for the firework shows in the small Kentucky towns across our river.  And the backyards in those towns, too.  It’s not the grand display that Cincinnati puts on with its rocket shots aimed at the moon.  Once the center of those rockets catch fire, the white opens [...]

There is mud-water today and flecks of light coming off the clouds onto the surface, the Ohio River bending to Pennsylvania one way, to the Mississippi the other.  Here, one slice, the cool winds blowing northeast against the current.  The sun on the water leaves pools of white in shelves of ice slivers, but it [...]

An airplane, tiny, slips through the white clouds that turn and curl around themselves, vanish into the sun.  I have to close my eyes because the sun is too bright.  To open them is to see the slipping and falling away of the world.  I wait for the sun to fall behind a cloud, the [...]

It was a tough week for my family.  My sister had surgery, and everyday I got in the car and drove, drove toward work or the river, drove and drove, kept looking into the water and beyond it, always beyond it, somewhere further south where she was having her surgery and hoping she would be [...]

I’m on my porch in Cincy, and today the wind is firing down from the north, cold, the first signs of autumn here after a week of rain.  The rain has left half the sunflower heads in my garden black with mold and white webs.  I cut them from the stalks, turned them up on [...]