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The Tide Pool Noon. The mussels close, and sweat seawater. Barnacles shut. A starfish abandons one, to seek the shade. Kelp suffers. The anemones fold into coats of mucus and neither eat nor fight. This afternoon beneath the gentle waves they’ll clone, resume their battle of a hundred years for space, firing poison darts at each other. The rock crab, somnolent now, or the sunflower star will eat the hermit crab who lost his home; beneath a scallop’s hundred eyes, minnows will leave the kelp for his remains. Yet this is paradise: no storm will tear the mussel from its rock, or crow raise it to drop and break; the bears and seals are only disembodied roars. A girl, lowered by her father, touches a starfish. Her eyes grow serious at the sensation: not wholly rough or quite gelatinous. Some adults watch. The aquarium, state-of-the-art and grand, which failed to revive the fortunes of the Lakefront, is almost empty as usual. And therefore full of emotions – not sentimental, cheap, but free for the taking, like clothes in front of some places on the edge of downtown. The child cries out (the thing moved) and, over her father’s shoulder, stares through the glass wall of the entrance at the empty towers, the boarded storefronts, all that unimaginable vastness. The Subtle Ages A sufficiently prolonged mood (months, decades, millennia?) of this type can make extraordinary things possible and ordinary. Like visions of the future. You need only correct for projection of hope, and desire for some sort of redemption, while not pretending you won’t be surprised. I’m surprised at the general peacefulness. Settlements by the shore, oases; one expected the depopulation. Towns, homemade schnapps; medium-serious brawls at the annual fair, swiftly subdued. Hygiene and science enough to stop plagues. Prolonged and obsessively equitable trade. In one place a plaza, with an undersized stone I can’t quite read but feel somehow is there for *my benefit. But what’s startling is the quiet. Norwegian farmers would be less laconic. Nor is it some hierarchic traditionalistic punctilio; only, it seems they’d rather do anything than talk. Or, except for sowing and harvest, act. “Speaking” glances from those stolid faces with the uniformly brown and weathered complexion say little, though they’re looking right at me whoever they’re talking to or grimly joking with. What aren’t they saying? What happened? What are they ashamed of? Second Opinion The girl at Starbucks, neat, lovely, studying, removed her earphones for a moment and I heard, not the wobbly male or the self-consciously *souffrante female I expected, but the vicious dogs I thought only boys liked … well, good for her. Now almost late, I leave, and cross the parking lot. Winter sun gilds the windows of the Medical Building, the homes across the street … one point five mil? No, more like nine hundred now. One has to take transcendence where one finds it. The building is a box, its windows slabs, but the style meant something in its time – efficiency, liberation. The houses with their silly lawns are copies of copies of something, but one can place some hope in the children coming home from school if not the schools ... I like this doctor. He’ll delay coming to the point. Some vestige or home-grown image of tact, consideration – a sense that courage requires a *stage, that it’s more than embarrassment at the idea of breaking down. And that the flesh is rude. This parking lot is as good a place as any to wonder what slogan applies at the end, what one can imagine crowds raising their fists for. *Freedom, I suppose – always meaningful, applicable; always and everywhere prepared to escape the earth like a rocket. Three. Two. One.