October in Sacramento (2022)

Three black raptors ascended, or crows, triangulating, while down here via satellite between Sacramento and Houston my father and I talked about Coleridge’s ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’, a poem which begins with an epigraph from Horace which translated says ‘more fitting as conversation’. My father said two or three times how much he liked Coleridge’s phrase ‘the Heart listens’ in ‘all is hush’d / And the Heart listens’.

A heavyset mother walking her toddler along, about, around the perimeter of Bahnfleth Park in Little Pocket was trying to teach her to say ‘trick or treat’. The apparent father kept quiet.

Next day the JFK High School marching band director stood on a ten-foot-high platform and via headset mic told the brass to glide their sustained G more smoothly. He said he could hear their footsteps disrupting it. Kol nidre, just dark, waxing half-moon.

Each day something from the previous day remains or returns. Justin Verlander, forty, of Manakin-Sabot, Virginia, back from Tommy John surgery, threw eight strikeouts in a row against the Phillies, tying an Astros franchise record. Verlander means dweller-by-pasture.

A nighttime vapor trail reflects light twice-removed. Above it, the small orange Jupiter bulb.

L and I agreed we should talk about what we’re doing before the month goes by. A mockingbird, broad perpendicular white stripe on underside of wings, squawks to clear the air and solos a while from tip-top of cypress or spruce alongside utility pole. Knowledge dissolves until it’s uniform in being nothing again and can ...