1 August 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. The difference between an order and a should construction is likely a matter of timing. In the Sessions of sweet silent thought the attorney general will be canned, his deputy sent out to pasture. A cow mooed this morning, a clock ticks; as I walked up the hill, I heard an earthquake in the groaning of the nearest house. My friend could call them to the decimal point before she stopped noticing. The house is a boat, anchored on porous earth. Ohia trees stand, not yet victims of the virus; coqui frogs chant a mile away, but not here, and the air is only sometimes acid. A violet belt of vog weaves through the Saddle, and where the horizon was is now a pastel smudge. It's not what we can't see that disturbs us, but that we see it laid out before us. He reached for the tortoise, but its legs were boiling away. A little girl died in ICE custody. They're summer camps, the president says, horrified his campaign director was put in solitary. They were all screaming obscenities, but we see her in a bubble, the blonde woman whose third finger thrusts forward at the reporter, face tangled, body coiled. She and they are making America great again. We could state the obvious in perpetuity, but where would it get us? To the next station of what cross? I wondered what the X meant in Charing X Road. The pope puts a cardinal in solitary to work on penance, which sounds like what he showed his altar boys. Sound unsenses us. Get as close as you can to the aching beams and the crickets. Cut out the middlemen, the lobbyists of meaning, the men in ostrich coats. Ostracize the priests, the grandfathers, the kind man across the street, the military baby-sitter, the perverted customs agent. I have put a good face on it, my friend says, but I am so disillusioned, so tired. As the Buddhists say, we are softened. Marvel at those who remain so solid on their solid earth.

for Carla Billiteri

--1 August 2018