The Trampoline
π₯β "mind-wired to distant things" Don DeLillo writes in ππ―π₯π¦π³πΈπ°π³ππ₯. The trampoline. Sitting there. A hunk of metal & net. Ever lie on one? On a clear day like yesterday? The heat against your back, on your face, sinking towards the ground where taller grass holds crystal ball moisture in the half shadow & eclipse of bouncing bodies. And there before you: blue. A perfect blue beyond the mouth of green netting & tree tops budding. Everything and nothing. Nothing. I first started to lie on the trampoline on days like yesterday, around the time my son was one. The trampoline. A freeplay prison. A piece of clothing. Harness strapped to your back & tied shut like a slack-spined bodice from where you can parachute upward, elsewhere, without worrying where the kids might escape to. Just up & downβ¦ up & down..... up & down. The trampoline helps to shutter & peel away the domestic world that lies in waiting when you stand up. The π’ππΈπ’πΊπ΄ view. Straight ahead. Eye-level. The π’ππΈπ’πΊπ΄ π’ππΈπ’πΊπ΄ view. The trampoline is such an empty thing, a husk of a thing. Empty trash emptied of aesthetic that takes up too much space & obscures too much π’ππΈπ’πΊπ΄ view. It looks upward, always upward. A cyclops' lidless eye. You π’ππΈπ’πΊπ΄ view it from the kitchen window when washing another dish, another bottle. Step in & lie down. The trampoline screams through that maw of netting, so vast & silent on a day like yesterday. I try to get my kids to lie with me & look up at the blue. They are jumping. They can't get a good bounce because my dead weight dulls the spring so they mostly stomp on me. It's comforting. I direct their attention to the tree tops that crest our view like eyelashes to talk about beginnings & what's to come. I direct their attention to a seagull that circles & think of vultures but don't answer their questions sufficiently as to why the seagull is circling because I have just thought of vultures. And then I think of planes; streams of shaving foam dwindling in the blue. Nothing. Not a wispπ€
APRIL 12, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night