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{adrift} joseph hutchison She collapsed on the sidewalk on the far side of the street. He watched one passerby pass by her … then another…. The crowd was parting like a river. Not that he helped her himself— middle of a block, lunch-time traffic risky—but later on that day he did record it in his journal, boiled down to a single aphoristic sentence: something about the indifference of Nature … all of us solitary, all of us adrift…. Words he can’t get back (the journal long ago lost) now that he could use their cold comfort again. All there is is the image from the dream that’s shaken him awake: the old woman’s stick-legs wrenched over the packages she’d dropped, her wig and gold-rimmed glasses askew, her thick orthopedic shoes twitching in the glare of a gone summer, somewhere between Fifteenth and Sixteenth on California Street. |
