Something I care about....

Finally I cry. When for so long there was no time but to hold tight to the smile. Four years after the planes fell out of an ordinary September sky and the fire came to America, the water came to New Orleans. This time, sky shook the Earth, ocean rose above the land, and water filled eight-tenths of our city like it does the human heart. Clouds shifting through attic roofs, through all the holes that could only have been made with little fists from the inside. The moaning houses, once homes, people crawling through them, collapsed like cardboard boxes, upon their first return. An amethyst sky holding its line against ash land once towns, barren and deserted as the Mojave. August 29, 2005, giving us all the greatest stories of our lives. Months later, the first squirrel, the evening pulses, cicadas, taking them for granted now. A man who blew his heart out with a shotgun last week in Plaquemines Parish. Robert on Christmas morning, four months after the levees failed, recognizing the skeleton because it wears the same clothes he dressed his mother in that Sunday morning in August. Returning the day after Christmas, shifting through still more debris because he needs to find her jawbone for the coroner to release her. For the humor, the smiles in their eyes, for the man who tells me, “Life is good. It really is,” and means it, as his dog curls up on his concrete slab foundation where its favorite couch once was, and sleeps. For how good life can be here. For the fact that still, after two days in any other U.S. city I sincerely pity the people who live there, in America, because they don’t know what life can be like. Upon this fastest disappearing earth on Earth.