I remember poking my finger in the clay –what served as soil in the side-yard of my youth in Kansas– burrowing about an inch down, as if to prompt the bursting of the hyacinths which I loved so much. It would rain.
Not a timid spray of west coast fog or an upright new england shower, but the stomping Pawnee thunder that shook the screen door frames and filled the lake to swelling with its release.
The clay was an unforgiving slab of liver. Silt that has been packed to forgetting: a form between lake and rock, an inevitable, infertile,
