On the Nature of Exposition by Nils Peterson

And now: a gout of wind, and now: his tie billows out and settles on the ash-deep fire riding above his index and middle fingers, and Now!—a quarter-sized hole.

Suddenly, his mind is with the birth of weather and the new wind shaking itself loose and setting out from the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk, carrying at first low gray wet clouds, and he follows as it crosses Kamatchka, the Bering Straits, the Aleutians, the Kuskokwim Mountains, and curls down towards Coos Bay, Eureka then along the coast to get here just in time to flip his tie (Is this how change enters our lives? he marvels—it begins last week and far out at sea).

Now it is 1492 and he's off with the Nina, and the Pinta, and the Santa Maria to the New World, and again with Raleigh and Virginia Dare and Indians and the ceremonious inhaling of dried native flora—then slavery and plantations and the Civil War and depressions and soil erosion and crop quotas and subsidies and the ache of his lungs a couple of years before which made him give up the cigarettes he began as a declaration of independence at 16 and switch to the cigar which he now smokes.

Back now to the Carboniferous, the Jurassic, great foresty swamps, heavy hang of leaf and vine, the lumber and swagger of beasts, heavings of earth, flux of continents, sinking of seas, the procession of stars, transmogrifications of bog and flesh into dark diamonds…  And now he joins his ancestors as down from the trees they come making custom and discovering—Ah! Fire, and war, science, shortages, substitutes— and, nodding at his parents as they leave the old country to meet in New York in an English for Foreigners class, he hurtles along by way of miners, capitalism, academia, coal tar derivatives, rayon, nylon, and, at long last, polyester, to swing into his own immediate life on the rope of his burnt tie, thinking—any event holds all history, thinking, the first sentence of every story is "Let there be Nils."

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