Hafford VI: Clarke & Leonore

I drew a woman's face on the sidewalk yesterday evening using stuff I found on my lawn, like grass and cigarette butts. I thought about gluing it down.

"Kind of a waste, isn't it?" asked my middle-aged next-door neighbour Clarke in his most observational tone. He runs the town dump, and watches a lot of Law & Order. We drink together sometimes.

I folded a dandelion stem in the shape of an earlobe, asking, "How's work?"

"Mmm," he exhaled, thinking. Clarke takes his job very seriously. "The Crawfords threw out a good couch, so now I've got it in the lookout shed." He scratched his shoulder with a thumb. "Say," he exclaimed as I created the nose, "she's a good-looking woman." He knelt down respectfully to examine. "You know, I started writing a poem once," he began. "I've still got it somewhere."

"Yeah?" I asked. "What's it about?"

"Leonore."

His ex-wife.