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The Salt City
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
59 The Salt City As if all of them—not only a wife, a mother, singular, but all the wives and mothers, and also sons and uncles, daughters, family spaniels, sisters, fathers, kick-abouts, the stray cockatiel— have turned to what they fled, they become transfigured, mute and gleaming under a harsh, evaporative light that chastens even the salt-dry shrubs of August, already tindered foothills, skyscrapers (so lately just reflective, raised from fired sheets of sand and unrevealing), the marbled halls of government, Ford Explorers, distant peaks. Would-be vagrants cast glancing over half-turned shoulders, not regretful, nor compassionate, nor glad, shrug on disaster, some force meant to push them forward (hungry for the next taste on the wind, and traveling light, their duffles and galoshes abandoned with pinched, particular lifetimes of advice, suggestions taken, still untaken), not to fix them here. ...