Out Of Month But In Season

A house in Helena, Arkansas, two gingkos straddle the yard, and where it clumps alive as the street is slow
the tug of a frontwalk leash, a porch, with glider, three humans harmonize wide disfiguring yawns.

Townfolk have been stopping through the afternoon to watch them. Mass incendiary haloes. Mellow supernovae that shock
eyes from a block's length distance. But as you get closer with visual charisma, the otherworldly
charm punishes a left hook: downwind updrafts of rancid, post-coital swelter.

The Comptons, the Spader children; Mrs. Freeling and her out-of-state Church friend Millie
are standing, in
compromised awe, each with a writerly hand lifted, to pinch their noses. One assumes they breathe through
the mouth. Sparkling, but sluggishly. In bodily attitudes of discomfort obstructing gratitude.

Only after arriving weeks before the schoolyear had we slowly, intuitively adjusted, like the chill of sea
outside a wetsuit, maybe or just not a person that was a certain unmeasurable swath of skin inside, plus the
predetermined webworks of nerves, the obscure heart, confiding without disclosure a brain's hidden, confused
potency, to the town, and its rhythms--that where there was a motionless nexus there was a Delta, Mississippi, and no amount of romanticism in roast of some Horrific, Fertile South
could counteract that.

Such was Arkansas. And those pedestrians, in solvent late light, what would you call them? Onlookers, voyeurs
gone public? Of course and then again, not. More an alien naturalism of cutout harmless darkness. Across the grass,
dry as arid. With exhalations as creative as sound. Arkansasans.