Someone You Know Dies

Someone you know dies. Then someone else. You hardly miss a beat. You almost hardly miss a beat. What is a beat? A breath between one action and the next. Urbanity counted off by a policeman’s feet. Something new to follow. To jibe with. Part of unison.

An “office park.” In what sense is this a “park”? Are the tall buildings tabulated with windows actually trees? There are sometimes people sitting on their steps, eating a packed lunch. Something “packed” is optimistic, assumes that time is “on its side.” Where are the sides? How to find the right one, the one owned by time?

A “cloverleaf.” How is it a leaf of clover? Because it creates a similar outline. Not of just any clover, but a lucky, “four-leaf” clover. Do motorists who travel one share its luck, “the luck of the Irish”? Are the Irish luckier than others, despite the famine that ate every potato? Every. Single. One.

If you are part of a big pedestrian “X” you are doing the “Barnes Dance.” What luck its inventor was named “Barnes.” If many people cross the intersection at once, they mesh in the center, and sometimes a person who entered the street as an impresario finds, upon reaching the diagonally opposite curb, that they are now a watchmaker; the seamstress a stonecutter; the parachutist a short-order cook; the bell-ringer a singing telegram; the basket weaver, a willow tree.