3 August 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. Start again from the so-called “prompt'; the age demands speed, but ordains surface complexity. All you need know is contained in Manafort's ostrich coat. An ostrich sprints down an Australian road, while professional goats eat up Boise's flowers. They are browsers, not grazers, my son's girlfriend says, chuckling at the company that promises well-cut lawns. What it means to grow old. What it means to be on the downside of the arch in a tub, having peered through portholes at a city that promises an opening for us white folks. How easily information turns to judgment, judgment to hectoring. Who can tell the hurricane from the volcanic “event”? Do I send him black sand and lava rock, despite Pele or a park ranger's mythological purchase? My book on ethics sits in the shed, softening in the humid air. The man in ostrich coat hid income on his taxes. “Our houses are worth nothing now. Should we pay?” To which the man from the county said, “Yes, we're still collecting.” What it means to pay, or pay off, to offer a defense so flimsy it demands a pardon. What it means to grow old at such a time, when earth casts off her coat and magma fills 300,000 Olympic size pools (for those of you not familiar with scientific lingo). To lose one's “brother” or one's wife. Or, in depression, to lose what is not there but feels lost, the threat of a lava tube below the surface of one of three highways across the island. One woman asked and asked again who would watch for her kids who play on the emergency by-pass road. My neighbor leaned over, whispering, “she should tell her kids not to play there.” Sun through the front windows, mist to the side, earth stumbles underneath. Time lapses like the crater spilling rock (deeper than the Empire State Building). We compare these events to objects, somewhere on the road to the volcano where the invasive species have settled. The air breathes their perfume. When the wind shifts, it'll be sulfur dioxide.

--3 August 2018