15 April 2020
Things we can’t do
with our hands: shake them, touch our faces, leave them unwashed, pay without sanitizing, open mail without spiritual doubt. The provenance
of everything is out of our hands. What our hands cannot reach they
cannot infect. Second-hand is also suspect, especially when it’s
smoke.
Get a handle on your
feelings. They’ve got swing, like a big band, but some days they
strike out not for the territories but over home plate. If home is a
base, why is it not called one? Geometry as guide to metaphor. The pentagon qualifies nothing.
She must have been
surprised when Igor Stravinsky dropped by to suggest she rewrite his
Fire Bird. He appeared young, not the old man of the record jackets.
He dropped by before the other gods, and Dvorak, whose music she
reclaimed for field workers, by way of Krishna. Asked how hard it was
to be both black and homosexual, Baldwin laughed and said he thought
he’d hit the jackpot. I remember his hand, the cigarette’s
trailing smoke.
Authenticity is its
own route out.
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