Spill

           Mr. Hollingshead fell on his violin-playing wrist today.

The girls held his hands and feet; the boys came to lift him into

a chair. And from the hard chair he was slid onto a cushioned

one with wheels, which a med tech unfolded. Black-uniformed

medics moved him to a gurney. He’s gone now in the ambulance

so full of heart. So close and ready when urgencies happen. But

maybe Mr. Hollingshead is wondering who he is now—as I

remember from tripping backward over a bulldog-thick garden

frog into the Redwood Barn’s flats of grinning gazanias and accepting

fuzzy aster-blue things. Silly, shocking, maybe fatal for his orchestral

ambitions, like the other Sundays we’d seen him sport a bowtie and

smart white shirt. We were hearing the music rip in two, a bullfrog’s

croak to keep the melody from turning into stone. The Rearranger,

I told myself, we have met him now.