Afterlife
Perhaps the four-color photograph of a lube stop and car wash,
like a heaven above the numbered days and months of a giveaway calendar,
is heaven and shall be our dominion forever, with glare on the glass doors
and lettering spelling something. Maybe the man with indistinguishable features
standing on a sidewalk runs things, and those driving vehicles somewhere
for eternity: heaven's emissaries, the interrupting angels, who veer
from this to that world. In the few scraps blown in after the asphalt was swept
and the pyramid of mortared cannonballs in the park off the highway,
where the swings hang absolutely still, as if painted there, we find our joy always.
And there, on the photograph's left edge, the birds eternally arriving.
(originally appeared in The Ohio Review)
