Stripes and solids. Colors gleam, roll smooth on green felt. A pool ball feels perfect in size and shape and heft. The evening is full of angles and banks and side pocket magic. One shot hits three rails before kissing the eight. Roy’s place has a wood burning stove, an eight-foot table.

Dumb cane stalks bend and crane like scoliosis spines angling towards the light. Is this clay pot too small? Are the roots tangled and knotted through soil and perlite? Are they coiled around the base like a dormant snake? And what about us, did we think to check our roots? Change pots?

I half-expect a shotgun blast to startle the dozens of blackbirds perched in the tall, barren tree – or maybe the first volley from a twenty-one gun salute. In a firing squad, one of the rifles has a blank round. Plausible deniability. Nothing startles the birds. They leave of their own accord.  

The lunchtime coffee is bitter and stale. It tastes like the color of the cement sky. Cinders tumble in the ocean of my stomach. The cars on the thoroughfare hurry through the rain, spraying misty puddles in their wake. The backyard neighbor feeds his chickens and steals their eggs while they’re distracted.   

Tie-dye swirls in glassy blue color the horizon. Higher up, the faintest hints of white suggest the apparition of clouds, ghosts that can’t fully materialize. The day is bright. It’s almost spring. The birds know it. I don’t remember when or where I learned the name for crocuses, but there they are.

The midday crash wasn’t a crash. BMW. Maybe a curb. I could hear the skid, see the smoke and spinout. Minutes later, the car rolls clanking, slow, undetected into a parking lot. Wheel bent in, rear bumper hangs. No other cars involved. Two men exit, pace, eventually leave. Nobody called it in.

Blackbirds rise against a tormented sky – phantoms fleeing a lightless dawn. The streets are slick and, in some spots, dusty with snow. A March lion lets out a halfhearted roar as if to say, “I will not go quietly.” I have the warmth of the house, the fluorescent glow of chandelier lights.

Dive back down. Into sleep, into dreams, into winter morning darkness. I’m disoriented in time, not quite unstuck. A small plane unzips the sky as it passes. The coffee pot ticks in spits and spurts like an irregular watch falling behind. I should get a move on. Get a move on. Get.