Photograph by John Vachon, courtesy of the Library of Congress Photographs & Prints Division, LC-USF33-001879-M2
March. The imperative: to go forward, like an army grunt or a spangled-up high-school girl throwing a baton. Go forward, whether you want to or not. And the wind at your back, blowing your hair into your eyes, reinforces that. March is the month when you wonder why you even bother to comb your hair, when everything is in disorder. Even the Anglo-Saxons, who didn’t mind having wind-tousled hair, called it hlyd monath or hraed monath, stormy month, rugged month. And early spring wind is the weirdest. It’s not hot or cold; it feels like air that blew down from the freeze of outer space by way of cherry blossoms. It churns up little cyclones of dead leaves and dust and chips of Styrofoam, lit up here and there with the silver glint of a gum wrapper.
This is paper trash blowing on the Eads Bridge, in the era before modern trash, all plastic foil printed with unsettling color combinations like purple and orange. It seems organic by comparison, almost pretty. It is not hard to imagine it as a poem with one word written on each scrap; or a whirlwind stirred up by a warlock whose day job was trash collector, sigils written on junk-mail coupons and sandwich wrappers; or just something with its own intelligence, a conspiracy of tossed tickets and receipts and lists, fluttering back to the people who tossed them.
