Monday, August 6, 2018

6 August 2018


I want to write an honest sentence. Interrupted, she said she lives alone with her cats, speaks whenever she feels like it. Laughter precludes apology. Yes, there was a meeting, but results were disappointing, and besides nothing was illegal. Who's to know which statement is true, the one we suspect, or the one we wish for? They're all sentences, or most of them, carrying bare minimum of verb and noun toward a moment of confusion or collusion. Change the word to “conspiracy.” Or “piracy.” The earthquakes stopped; a day later and apropos of nothing, my bedside lamp fell to the floor. To live on an earth without intention is to suffer. We could demand that Pele apologize, but the Christians down Highway 11 have declared her “fake news.” She at least intends, though what we cannot know. What I love about the teachings is their being drenched in metaphor; we talk not about yearning, but about potato chips. Those who were adopted live inside the metaphors the rest of you weave. It's a mythological condition, loss and recovery acted out by the village clown. It was everything I'd read all these years, staged before me, except the stage was also real. The eyes of the elders gazed at me through narrow, lined faces. I drank my tea from a glass and gazed back. The meeting was about adoptions, and then it was about dirt.
for John Gallaher

--6 August 2018

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