After all the jacks are in their boxes

I was driving down 3rd yesterday, in the evening, and the light was so golden and the air so suffused with it that it nearly made me sad. Yes, that's what I meant. Sad.

Today, I walked around the block with Sophie, and she was tired. The roses in every yard were blooming red and white and peach and pink. Each bush carried what seemed like hundreds of blooms, and even the tiniest run-down house had a scraggly bush with ridiculously over-sized heads all over it. It's like Oz, I said to Sophie, and thought, again of Edna St. Vincent Millay and her springtime idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.


The wind whipped up in the early hours of the morning, the arms of the tree in the alley beside my bedroom tapped on my window and woke me. It was a palm frond-dodging day of swaying trees, of skittering white clouds, the wind a sussuration.




After all the jacks are in their boxes 
And the clowns have all gone to bed 
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street 
Footprints dressed in red 
And the wind whispers Mary 
A broom is drearily sweeping 
Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life 
Somewhere a queen is weeping 
Somewhere a king has no wife 
And the wind, it cries Mary 
The traffic lights they turn up blue tomorrow 
And shine their emptiness down on my bed 
The tiny island sags downstream 
‘Cause the life that lived is, is dead 
And the wind screams Mary 
Will the wind ever remember 
The names it has blown in the past 
And with his crutch, it’s old age, and it's wisdom 
It whispers no, this will be the last 
And the wind cries Mary