THE DISTRIBUTION OF MASS IS NOT FRACTAL

Today I am caught in the whorl of time: The week falls away from my side. I didn’t go home from work yesterday, I took the T to the Boston Public Gardens. It was around 7 and evening was pumpkinish. Normally I take the Red Line from South Station, get off at Downtown Crossing, switch to the Orange Line and get off at either Back Bay or Mass Ave Station and walk home. This morning the sheets were heavy, and wet, and stuck to my body. The weight was enormous. I lay there thinking about the time my mother and I went to the circus in Albuquerque: From behind a tattered curtain the ‘Amazing Renaldo’ led an elephant to the center ring. Renaldo was plain, paper thin, the wisps of his moustache curled. In the other ring poodles rolled on steel balls, a contortionist turned into herself as a carnation does when left in water too long. Renaldo lay on his back with a small lozenge of wood on his chest. His eyes locked on the elephant’s eyes, those two big gooseberries. No hand gestures. No words. The elephant placed its two forelegs on the board and lifted its hind feet. It must have been a trick, a sort of hocus-pocus, I thought. I closed my eyes for a moment and in the mottled shadows I see the elephant’s eyes, though I hold them now. I understand. It’s not the elephant’s weight but the surface it stands on, because the distribution of mass is not fractal. I get out of bed. The sun enlarges its yellow mouth. In my patio a narcissus stretches its clumsy neck and cups the world in its chalice. Yesterday I took an alternate route home: The Red Line from South Station to Park Street, switched to the Green Line to Arlington Station. I wanted to admire the tulips in Boston Public Gardens. I needed to relearn the permanence of spring. I ascended the T’s stairs, walked into the arc-light but the tulips had not picked the lock of the topsoil. I turned from the bronzed side of Washington riding his horse and made my way home. I wouldn’t have noticed, but my head was pointed toward the ground because the sun was full of intent—Against the south gate of the garden one white tulip. A bulb must have fallen out of the city-gardener’s wheelbarrow in fall when he made his way to the beds that surround Washington. I closed my eyes and heard the squeak of his wheelbarrow, smell the soil on his gloves. I put that romantic thought out of my head. The tulip was small and clung to the wrought ironwork. It would not survive, a cold front was coming. I am not faultless.