Walking the Turtle Creek Mall
The creek is gone, bulldozed in, but because it’s a hundred every day (more in the Wal-Mart parking lot) and because this sunbelt town is the all- you-care-to-eat capital of the world, we’re walking where it’s cool, past the food court’s corn dog smells, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Waldenbooks and the Full Gospel Bookstore, down to Radio Shack and the buxom amputees of Victoria’s Secret. We count cowboy boots, fat Nintendo kids in line at the Cineplex, high-haired ex-beauty queens trailing clouds of Chanel and hairspray. Security, in her mounty cap, nods beneath the single skylight like a plant by a river where a salesgirl dreams she poles her sampan of imitation jewels.
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Walking the Turtle Creek Mall
To Garden
It’s this bottom-of-the-garden fierce democracy of leaf and branch — all the tall green things competing for the light — you have to hack at, trying to let the mountain in, something big to reckon with at last, beyond brittle fuchsia branches and the awful blood-drawing, beyond-argument persistence of briars: how they bow to the blade, then come back.
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To Garden
Stars, Trainwhistles, Weeds
The feel as a boy is that of floating with stars, lark buntings, prairie dogs, and pikas traveling the same road a long while just to meet us. Skies then were veined and birdwinged as right now, while rainbow fish flew without moving over the beadwork in creekbeds. Yet even back then I must have halfway overheard the distant trainwhistles shipping carloads of thumbs and big toes to the bottom of Egypt. Oh, it takes a long time to arrive, longer far to inherit the territory. Anciently intricate weeds brush against us, ever since childhood and still we can’t name them.
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Stars, Trainwhistles, Weeds