After the Women’s March in Oakland, R. and I sat on a muddy hillside, she in a nightgown doing duty as a dress that would never be clean again, and looked for four-leaf clover. We found several, and those we picked wilted within minutes, so I’m glad we let the others be. Last week I went to a conference in Washington, DC in order to get in the habit of talking about my book, and whenever I left the convention center—which was often, in among all that presentation of self—the Capitol was out there, hanging over the edge of things. White stone, cold wind, the moon.
The size of the exhibition hall, the hundreds of booths and display tables: it’s not a world that can come into focus all at once. The old fantasy of finding a unique pivot point between myself and that world stands revealed as incoherent, and I’m glad to let it go.
In the sandy riverbeds of childhood were broad dark leaves, dotted underneath with eggs like bright green sand grains. I still don’t know what laid them.
