Meditation 45

23 April 2020

April is the cruelest national poetry month. An anthropologist quotes Eliot in his book about Cambodian farmers, the end comes at the beginning. We heard “Raindrops keep falling on my head” on a domestic flight from Phnom Penh to Siem Riep. Flying back, we nearly landed before the runway began. If you bought stock in words, they have little value now. One day he wants businesses to open; the next day he abhors that decision. Everything by proxy, save self-praise. A runway is for models; he gestures with his hands, replacing scientific models with curvy ones.

Clean air provides cover for relaxing clean air standards. The senate leader says states should declare bankruptcy before begging the Feds for more money. I miss the old cover stories, even B-movie narratives about welfare queens. They covered an empty space where we assumed shame to be. Now the clothes are gone, and the emperor revels in his flaccid cock, waving it for everything to see. It’s the best. We should offer thanks to him for flashing it. Might be the only electricity we have once the power gets cut.

In backwards land, the sky sits in for the earth, and the poor pay our bills, if not on time, then with their sweat and blood. My father hated preferred “perspire” to “sweat” except after he’d been gardening for hours. Then it was the “sweat of my brow.” A writer sweats sound, syllable, makes sentences of twigs. The mayor of Las Vegas offers her citizens up as a grand experiment. Death by virus or death by unemployment. A student writes about the word “redundant” in a Harryette Mullen poem. He likes the way she undresses her words.

White supremacists wander the streets of the city bearing their arms, calling for freedom. All these words have started to make me sick. The wretching of the earth, the wretched among us. There’s no e-vite for them to meet at Ellis Island, to be “brought” instead of “born.” The American experiment was adoption but now they require blood-lines.

A neighbor’s family got land in Pennsylvania because, as Hessians, they’d helped to win that war. They got more land after the next war. His immediate family were coal miners. The American dream goes under, where air is dust. Meat processing is another phrase for virus contagion. He scatters seed for his flock of doves.

Essential weed whackers trill. A neighbor complains about tall grass; it gets mowed. A little boy with Hawaiian grandpa rides a small Spiderman bike, blue and red with webbing in the front. They have a portrait of the Queen in their garage, and the old man a granddaughter named La`i, or ti leaf. Our mailman works to the sound of Rush Limbaugh. The cracks are showing.