The Hour's Smell

Up the block the light goes green. Over the street, roof to roof, there is a net of air plants, silver-gray and fat with the day's damp. The corner with the fig and the refrigerator is behind you.

On the hour the net lets go of a smell. Cut grass, and woodsmoke. A woman on a stoop looks up when it changes. Last week at this hour, she tells the block, it was wet dog with a dash of pine.

Past a brewery, a narrow storefront with its shutter half up leaks jasmine, basil, charred cedar, and under them an edge you place, after a while, as ozone. People come out of it slowly, with their eyes shut and a hand on the wall. A man in a veteran's cap. Two kids. A woman in a library lanyard. A man in a city polo, who says to no one that he is not here in any official capacity. The woman in the lanyard holds the shutter up for him.

Nobody carries anything out.

Halfway down the block the net sags to head height, and two people are up ladders under it.