I write it down to remember. The curse. The frothing hate. The flames of change, burning, burning buildings down, burning those seminal documents, but also burning in the hearts of workers and old hippies and millennials. Street shots! Sign shots! How glad we are for drones! Get the whole crowd! Record it. Show it. Archive it.

The air is cool. It’s May. A robin nests in the yew that flanks the driveway. We look into each other’s eyes several times a day. I restrain the impulse to talk to her as if she’s a dog. “Good girl!” All alpha enthusiasm.

The trains will run to the Common. The trains will fill with sign-carrying old people, middle-aged people, and young people. Career folks will walk over from their offices. Some through Chinatown, some through the Theater District.

People still dance I learned last weekend. All floating, twisting, leg-lifting grace. Defiance of gravity. Anatomy trained to do the impossible. Storytelling in the exits and entrances and in what dancer meets up with what other dancer and how.

Funny how the mind wanderers. I imagined post-performance scenarios like it was my job. Oh, she’s gonna eat a plate of pasta later. Oh, he’s gonna fuck his boyfriend later. That one? A cigarette is in her future. We go on in the ways we go on.

Walking through Chinatown to see Alvin Ailey. Tiptoeing to a nest-bearing yew bush. Whispering, imagining. Pasta, sex, cigarettes. We try to guess how many eggs she’s laid. Has she laid them already? The guy with the Afro and the bare chest commanded attention. How he slid across the stage as if propelled by invisible liquid force. Can I get me some? This week I offer qualifiers – oh no it’s not my hip that’s bothering me, it’s my back. It’s inevitable and pathetic and boring, this business of managing pain and growing older. I will go because I must. I will go because my excuses don’t tally. I will go because what else can I do? Scold Senator Whitehouse for missing a Senate vote about tariffs which even though his vote would’ve been decisive in the Senate, the bill would never have even made it to a vote in the House?

I’ve taken to thanking Senator Warren on Blusky, signing my comment, “Dee Mallon in Newton” as if that means anything.

Even though I am below notice, I’ve already turned off facial recognition on my phone for this afternoon’s protest. Why, by the way, would I even go unless I could take pictures? My progress up and out of the train tunnel will have nothing of liquid grace about it. But I’ll make it. I can make it.

I write things down to remember. The search at the right house but with the wrong occupants. Remember this! The mother in her slip out front in the rain mewls, “Even my husband hasn’t seen my daughters in their underwear. It’s not proper.”

That’s one way to put things: it’s not proper. It’s flagrantly unconstitutional is another way to put it — all the firings, all the hobbling of US foreign aid and domestic agencies, the gutting of our science communities. Stealing power from Congress.

How small our satisfactions! Tesla stock falling off a cliff and now the board looking for a new CEO. All the president’s double digit negative polls. Workers taking to the streets in LA in unprecedented numbers.

Still, every small consolation carries that plaintive query: what’s it gonna take? I know nothing. I try to keep up and I scan and sometimes even drill down. I look for citations, verified sources. A new way to read.

Wallpaper the Rotunda with impeachment papers, I say — perhaps leaving blank the areas where J6 insurrectionists smeared their shit. We could make info cards like the ones you see next to paintings in a museum. “This section of marble was covered with feces on January 6, 2020 by a so-called “peace – loving tourist” who, by the way, received a presidential pardon.”

We look around. Is it spring? Four days of wind had me worried. Is this spring now? Endless bobbing of arborvitae branches and maple limbs. No calm. No stillness. But now the wind has died down. The wind has died down, but the conflagration spreads.

Quick get the drones! Even red state victims of catastrophic flooding don’t get aid now? I can’t tell how I even feel about that. The year is 1/4 gone. The hundred day reports are both too much and too little. “Reshaping executive power.” I don’t think so. Shredding the constitution? Seeking vengeance? Lighting matches in every direction. Yes.

The robin eggs will either be laid or already have been laid. The sun keeps shining. There will be two or three or four eggs. We will watch. It will be spring, maybe a spring we don’t recognize, but spring nevertheless.

Is this about spring? Is this about death? Who even said that? It echoes in my head, lasting longer than the fluttering, thrusting impression of dancers on my eyelids.

Crossing Chinatown. Hurry! Downtown Crossing. I hardly recognize it. The fruit trees on the Common will be in bloom.

Excuse me, I must go rifle through my sign archive. I want the one that says: cruelty is not policy.

The mother in her black slip with gun-toting men behind her in the rain feeling shame for her underwear-clad daughters. Remember!

Meanwhile, a detainee in Vermont is released to an approving, cheering throng. People showed up. People took time out. People didn’t pause to ask will I/can I make a difference? They just showed up. Mohsen Mahdawi is released.