## One blade of grass, bent like a stinky mutt’s ear. Scarred, serrated, hacked and beat down by the dull blade of an impoverished city council’s ancient lawn mower, it half stands, oblivious to the orange light from the Texaco across the street. Arrayed around it, by chance, five pebbles, roughly round, ochre, barely translucent, dimpling the dust, unstepped on. In another life, they could have been pea gravel under a playground, stomped with joy and hurled by grubby fists, until insouciant parents finally scolded. Instead, they sit here, neither in the road nor in the ditch, near the park where no-one plays, occasionally in the shade of the great old willow arcing overhead. No-one? The merry-go round, once painted like a circus, now flaking chips and rust, begins to turn. It squawks and skirls in disbelief; its boards begin to rumble. Worn-out tennies jab at the packed earth around the circumference—until they push, and leap! and ride, in dizziness and midnight swirling spin-art streaks of light. Eyes closed, pulse pounding, slowly slowing. Every knurl of bark on every nearby tree; every shoe-scuffed root protruding through the dust; every mottled speck of asphalt in the road; every pane of every darkened window in the closed-up, sleeping houses up and down the block. Every glimmer of each headlight of every car that streaks away tangentially, caught up in some parallel highway universe; every hiss of every tire. Every paltry note of every country song that briefly flares out of an open window of a beat-up truck, pulling out of the parking lot across the way. Every disappearing thing. Every forgotten autumn, every cookout, every hot dog, every half-uneaten bun. Every tick of every clock. Every penny in the drawer. Every hue of every rainbow on the oil-slick fetid water in the ditch between the park and road; every pebble; every blade of grass, even the dead ones, even the partial, even the half-lopped off, half-rotten ones that will never grow again. The rider on the merry-go-round, he loves them all. He sees them, feels them, he alone becomes them, and he loves them all. The spinning slowly stops. He opens his eyes.