12 March 2017

Try covering them [certain memories] with a thick cloud of forgetting. I hadn't thought forgetting a thick thing, more like a balloon lost to the green screen of mountains. In Hiroshima at the bottom of the 7^th, everyone filled a balloon with smoky air, then let it go. I was surprised to be surprised to see a modern city, thinking it had been forgotten. Memory inhabits air, whose invisibility cloak hides it from the field, where the balloons fell. I remember I have two hands, one student wrote. And I that walking stands in for adrenaline and bad dreams, because after so many decades I can't face what it was I felt. Rick Ankiel threw five wild pitches in one game, before he was pulled. Why that hurts so to watch, when West Virginia coal miners will die for lack of health care, and the nurse's brother died of kidney cancer at 25. The ER told him twice he was ok. The difference between pain and anger, between what we sense and what we see, is thin. Contractors have been advised to plan the wall with good aesthetics in mind.

--12 March 2017