Delft/Miami

After seeing a photograph by Chris del Risco during a visit to his studio

Dust gathers into fates, chalks and grays in a ladder of light the window and its burlap rag allow to fall by rungs of density into the room. Limelit, the pewter bracelet—a dark halo with curls that deflect its cheapness—lies on the wooden shelf beneath the sill. A curl of thread from the curtain, made tungsten by the afternoon’s roulette of light, cracks the sky of the room without thunder. All about, the myriad filigrees of particles in their melodious hovering. To the bracelet’s left a crumpled sheet, animal in pose and outline, gleams like a clean moon with even its crevices blanched, for that is what the light proclaims and the artist has chosen to see.

Later, going west on the Causeway from the Beach into Miami, against the grain of sunset, I drive the summer mad in my air-conditioned shell. I ponder the obese cruise ship heading east in the channel out to sea, and I think the obvious things to get them on their way—the miracle of buoyancy, or rather its boring numerics, and the cost of babbling leisure, and this hideous piling of decks on the ever smaller base of ship. And how no light can make us see beauty in the distances. Miami readies its tinseled self for the coming night. I plunge ever faster into its gape while the city is still gray against the sun, leaden in sleep and cannot pay me back in dream for how I see it.