Rough Likeness: Essays Read Online Free PDF

on the boardwalk, they’re absolutely dedicated to being human, and though not one of them has a choice, many variations come forth. All the ways are recognizable, but some are more precise in cast and tensity, saturation and value, and take patience to see and to name.
    Outside’s thunderclap, its tonnage and stipple. The toilet in the room above’s flush. Extended, deepening thunder sounds. The picture window’s darkening glaze. Except for the mother with her hood pulled tight, a sporty family neverminding the rain, laughing, carrying big, wet cups of coffee. A runner tendon-stretching, braced against a stop sign. An old-salt type in a long, yellow slicker waving to someone, or directing the deluge. More cars than usual heading north to the parkway, as goes the decision through many heads at once to leave the shore earlier than planned. Methods of resignation abound: one on a gearless soft-seater pitches into the weather headfirst, a sack of oranges hooked on his arm. Four pedaling a surrey remain committed to their rented hour. The sky brightens. The clouds shift. The cars slow and their numbers decrease. Runners come out, had they ducked under awnings. Outside our window, a gaslamp-style streetlight’s on; it must have self-lit at the first hint of dark. Walkers wearing long sleeves and sweatshirts, who must have tested (head out a window, arm out a door) the temperature before emerging.
    Various pitched rumbles, filling, ablating. A rough sound, that otherwise might be silk tearing, but for now is tires parting puddles. All headlights on. Sky darkening again. Those choosing to be out or having been caught, somewhere on those bodies in the noisy rain: shiny, cicatricial spots of damp. Wet shoulders where clothing is sticking. Abrasions on ankles where sockless shoes rub. Itchy tags. Rings of sweat. Objectwise, sunglasses in bags or hooked at collars. Loose, jangling change. Newspapers rolled and stuffed in back pockets. Some lightning now, but candescent, not the sky-ripping variety. Some darkness lifting at the horizon, baring a strip between sea and sky, like a hem rising over a sock.
    Now the umbrellas, now that the walkers have figured it out: rainy not rain. Dark as any November day, late in the afternoon. Blue turned to its compounds and alloys, its milkier elements, whitened and hardened. On Beach Drive, the activity increases: doppler riffs. Gutters surging. Thunder yanked like special-effect sheets of aluminum, behind the scenes. A jogger who can’t economize movements, whose legs seem strapped on and lack propulsion, whose elbows angle too far from his body, seems wetter than others. Bending in wind, heavy with rain, some hardy beach roses suggest a boat tethered and scuffed against unseen pilings.
    One species of sleeping person can sense rain and somehow knows to stay abed, undisturbed in their summer rental, up and down the beach. An announcement such as this won’t jar them: May I have your attention, please. Lightning is on the beachfront. Lightning is on the beachfront. Clear the area for your safety . It sounds not at all canned: the voice of a real and excited someone, red-faced, soaked and bringing the news. At the horizon where ocean meets sky, a mist congests and erases perspective. Rain threshes the sand. The sky darkens further. The sky turns, toward or into. The sky now. The sky is—what is the shade, gradient, hue, tint I’m seeing? The _________ sky. That sense of searching, fingertips tapping, calling forth terms. Sifting, anticipating: the something sky. Something. Something pushes in. It draws up to full height.
    It blots out any other sky, gunmetal, does .
    How irksome. Gunmetal. What a cliché.
    Strike me down if I use it again. If I don’t, right now, erase this method by which we impart, those of us who know nothing about guns, drama to a sky, pressure to a scene, hardness, know-how, coldness to a description, glad for its hint of treachery, its sidelong, thanatotic meanness.
    Why