Some days it really does pay.


Apacatastasis

On the corner of 4th and Pike,
the man in green silk suit swings
into his litany again.
"The air is moving as if alive,
the air is moving as if alive,"
he sings, swaying slightly, his weeping
eyes fixed so that our legs pass through
the narrow shafts connecting him
to whatever world he sees.
"The air is moving
as if alive," he changes cadence,
pleading that we turn from our inconstancy,
that this blindness to essential light
must mean an end
to the casual heaven we suppose
we're dancing in. Of course
we ignore him, jostling to pass
out of range, almost running
as the Israelites ran from Jeremiah's
hysterical announcement: "Behold
I give this city into the hands
of the Chaldeans
and into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar,
King of Babylon, and he shall take it."
He did not say the air was moving,
though it may have been. And the blare
of traffic and bright riches
whirled about him and the sun beat down
like time.

At five o'clock the man in green
boards a bus to White Center
and sits quiet among the workers
going home. When he comes to his four-
room walk-up over the sagging hardware
store, his wife helps him off
with his coat and shoes and hands him lemonade.
All text and utterance then, even the living
air, reclines in the Realms of Rest and he says,
"What a day!
so long and swift with the air's design
I've come back almost before I left
and then
come back again, which goes to prove
that God is not a bus."

And kissing him she says, "Yes, the air is moving,
as all things, back to Him. But you, my perfect
surprise, are already there."
Then they lean into their contentment,
holding hands. Outside, a yellow traffic light
blinks SLOW DOWN above the rubble
choked streets.

-- Christopher Howell