Sisters-in-law
A man rents a car at the car rental agency in the municipal airport where my five sisters-in-law work.
They recognize the man as famous, but as required, they ask for identification.
He takes a handful of credit cards out of his pocket and tosses them on the counter like an ace-high flush. Robert Allen Zimmerman embossed on each.
“Happy?” he says.
On the third night, Bob Dylan returns the car. It’s been mistreated. One imagines mud on boozy headlights, corn stalks caught in the undercarriage, a side mirror hanging bleary from the door.
A woman is with him.
“Riotous living,” he says.
I know this about the women in my wife’s family.
They were born like prophets, sympathetic to God and unsympathetic to man’s weaknesses.
Woe unto you. Do not unwill what God has willed. Do not spell your first zeal away.
One imagines Dylan and the woman standing in the green light of a trailer.
One imagines my sisters-in-law outside circling the car—circle, from the Hebrew galal, root of the noun Galilee—marking, as required, boxes on forms.
Happy. As one imagines Sisyphus happy.
Bird Report
March 16. 68 South. Heading into Yellow Springs. Above the scrub cedars on the sandy hillside and then over the pine treeline of the woods: the first crane of the year, the drainpipe neck, the bamboo legs, trailing.