Lightning splits the sky

Lightning splits the sky, crash lands behind the mountains on the horizon as we drive back from Ridgefield where we spent the day with relatives at the house KC's sister's housesitting. Long, skinny road leading to a long, skinny driveway, heavily shaded by trees tall enough that you nearly have to cock your head back all the way parallel to the ground to see their tops. KC said I would like the seclusion and, yeah, it's not bad. Vaughn gets to spend twenty minutes or so in the pool before it starts to thunder. Swims the length of the pool a few times, with the help of floaties. She already swims better than her old man. And that's not that much of a lie. She joins Papa and me in what I would probably call a den, harking back to an earlier time, but what seems to be universally referred to as a family room. We catch the end of a show on Animal Planet, some tanned, brave soul helping to save the elephants of Borneo. I'm holding Dash to keep him away from pulling on the dogs' tails while KC helps her sister with preparing supper. It's not long before Dash is about to doze off. I walk him around and check out the art on these strangers' walls. It's almost all abstract. There's something off, I think, with likening poetry to visual art when talking about its reception or the expectations of its audience, and how much more radical visual art is allowed to be. With so much contemporary poetry, the reader is expected to have a familiarity with the last fifty or so years of literary theory. As often as not it's all the reader is given, no flotation devices to strap around the arms. The art viewer doesn't need to rely on theory, doesn't need to take a stand, interpret or otherwise engage the work, all the viewer needs is to be struck by the piece, some quality of the piece, and have sufficient cash to purchase it or a print. Art and music don't invite scholars exclusively, so why should poetry? Not that poets should be making poems for those who don't like it. But it should be clear to anyone who steps outside of the insular nooks of the poetry world for even a short time that something is wrong with the way many poems are made these days. Even more wrong are the mechanisms, the industries, around the poems. We have burgers and hot dogs and pasta salad, and a special dessert, one-bowl chocolate cake, made by KC and Vaughn in the morning. Everyone loves it, except Vaughn; she likes it, but prefers the chocolate chip cookie Auntie Joss gives her. We stay long enough so that Vaughn can help feed the two dogs, scooping the dry food, and then the wet food, into their big ol' steel bowls. And then we pack up and head home, not realizing till we get there that we forgot the leftovers we were going to take. Driving north on 35, KC tells me about a house she knows in Ridgefield she wouldn't mind owning one day. If we could. I shake my head. "I don't want to live in Ridgefield," I say. "I used to have negative associations," she says, "but it's really nice. If we had a windfall," she says. "I don't want to live in Ridgefield," I say. We merge onto I-84 in Danbury, rain pouring down on the windshield, broad flashes of lightning lighting up the dark sky. "I like Washington," I say, "if we ever have a windfall." She knows this already. "Washington—or maybe Kent." She doesn't say anything, but places her left hand on my right, which I don't regard until now when I'm writing this down.