Miniature City

Waiting is a weed that promises blossoms. It endures the worst conditions, growing even near the end of the road.

*

In the bookstore, there’s one customer who regularly reads the last page before deciding on a book, then finds the experience spoiled: The vines are thwacked. The step-mother dies. Making his rounds, the hunter comes. Or doesn’t. 

But life’s not a peephole.

*

Most of the time you are the little man hunched in the snowglobe waiting for a shake. 

Here goes nothing, you say, angling into an anticipated wind.

*

Outside the warehouse, the bus stop bench sits in a tangle of mayweed. You lean back. If not for the search lights, these clouds wouldn’t be lit like this, from underneath.

*

The fields fill, and the trees and the housetops, and the chimneys choke. And the bricks turn red and there’s a heady scent of something that is not smoke.

*

It’s the slow city you built in a bottle that makes these blossoms possible.

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