In Favor of Lightning

October, a Parade

October, a Parade Do they wave and hear the music because the flowers are just now shivering or do the flowers shiver because of them, because, like weather, they are justpassing? I don't think it matters. Only that it is October now. Each oblong garden is a flag and for each flag, a murder, and last night I dreamed a flower so red it was black, and then grey and then it was gone. This evening our fathers have come out of the woodwork to stand at the curb under the seamlesssky. And when the whole thing is over they will look like the sky. Gigantic. Modest. I think this is what the sound of horns is trying to get at as the people flow out of their houses to watch, exhausted by a madness that carries them home. It is October. Leaves slip slowly off the elms, not unlike the anonymous dead who are in no hurry, who have fallen behind. And as if to remind ourselves of the nature of horror, the sky breaks into blossom, into a fire that glitters 33 white as skeletal snow. Pieces of it whistle down and the strange smoke lingers.October, the month might also be self-conscious with wasp husks on the stairs, with trees remembering how to die— a beauty that hesitates, a sound of bullets that might otherwise embarrass the planet blowing over. 34 ...