August 16, 2016

the quiet hum of industry

You wouldn't have noticed she was making a bookshelf out of paper, or
that he was figuring the math for a skateboard ramp, or how the backyard
was plotting next summer's harvest. It would have been impossible to recognize
the musician turning an ear toward a field of rustling corn, or a painter
puzzling over the weave of a blank canvas, or that writer in a hotel room in North Carolina,
her fingers on a warm keyboard, remembering the steps all over again. But this
is where the work gets done, this quiet hum of industry, away from the world's
fluorescent attention, with a beauty untheatric as a sea lion tottering off the docks at Pier 39
and into the salted, murky waters of the Pacific, where no one can see his eyes
lifting toward a filmy horizon or his back, gleaming with moonlight.