Cloud cover like a lid on. Thwarted trees. And three more hours of highway to be rid of. My darlings don't want a book on tape. They want a little indie rock, they want to melt the tweeters, they want mama in the trunk so they can have some un- remarked-on fun. Fine. I've got my window, I can contemplate the flatness of Ohio. I can think about the ghastly things we've leached into the topsoil, I can marvel that the scabrous fields will still accept the plow. Except some liquid thing is happening just behind the trees, some narrow sub- cutaneous infusion where the darkening earth and darker strato- cumulus have not yet sealed their hold. A pooling fed by needle drip: pellucid, orange, a tincture I would almost call unnatural were it not so plainly nature- born. Till what had been a stricken contiguity of winter-wasted saplings starts to sharpen and distill, as though a lens had been adjusted or a mind had cleared. Our sorry dispersal, the Bishop of Africa wrote to his flock, but the voice of a child recalled me. When the girls were small we took them to an island once, the sun above the sea, and with the other paying customers we'd watch it set. A yolk, I thought. The not-yet- torn meniscus with its cunning corrective to up and down. You've held one in your palm no doubt: remember the weight? Remember the lemony slickness we so oddly call "the white" and how it drains between your fingers? Not in chambering and wantonness the sun would swell nor strife and plumply flatten like a yolk-in-hand. Would steep there in the salt- besotted vapors till we must have been watching an aftereffect, so quickly did it vanish. Till the whole of expectation, wrote the bishop—this Ohio sky, the road, my noisy darlings—is exhausted and— now mandarin, madder—what was the future—cinnabar, saffron, marigold, quince—becomes the past.
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