American Fractal

In the Parking Lot of Our Dreams

100 In the Parking Lot of Our Dreams It’s almost spring and the painters are turning everything brown— the bars on the balcony brown; the façade of the coin laundry where my clothes spin clean another shade of brown, a mocha, a walnut; brown bricks, brown shingles on the row of townhouses out back like cookie-cut mountains, great glistening chocolate chips. Why brown? I wonder up at a brown woman on a ladder as she guides the grooves of each bristle across a thick brown drip. Cubre el moho, she says. It covers the rust. 101 Like any quiet man with his hands in his pockets and too much time I dig for the profundity in this. in pushing paint into corners, the burial of one thing beneath another, whole cities of fossilized ash—but I can’t find it. The painter reaches up to draw a second coat over the highest rung and a bluebird tattoo rises from her waistline like the morning sun. Three floors above our heads the date palms sway drunkenly on an offshore breeze, drop their shriveled fronds. It’s then I realize there’s enough change 102 left from the wash for a cup of coffee, maybe even a Milky Way. ...