23 April 2020
If you only heard
the racket, you’d never know. An old Asian woman in floppy hat charges at the hills behind her creaky walker. She goes faster than
Lilith and I do; I hear her coming, then I see her go. Another woman maintains her balance using ski poles on the concrete. A third, bent
forward at the waist, her hair newly colored brown, walks her
unpredictable dog. An old black man in USMC teeshirt carries his cane
as he rounds the block a second time.
America’s inner
ear is broken. The president says we should inject ourselves with
bleach to kill the virus. Moral vertigo, to go with our wounds.
The old meditations
were all-at-once. Now, I apply sentences to screen with tweezers.
When he first got his job at UH, my late colleague said he saw old
people in Manoa using nail clippers on their lawn. It’s a kind of
forced delicacy, this attempt to mend the tiniest imperfection. Do
combat with the torturer using his methods of invisible violence.
Tattoo and massage parlors are the backbone of Georgia’s economy.
Las Vegas is a petri dish. We gamble with casino workers, because
that’s all we know to do. The mayor has a degree in anthropology.
On camera, the test
swab shakes. Focus. Morning slows; even the wind seems to move
through a screen. Civil defense blares from our phones. Play roulette
with emergency. Would you rather die by hurricane or tsunami or
earthquake or pandemic? What are the virtues and drawbacks of each
mode of decease? It’s a multiple choice test, so all the answers
are suspect, and could be argued, were there a horizon beyond the
empty circle and the #2 pencil.
Hemlock, Lysol. A
friend came back from class astonished that “hem” and “lock”
could be taken apart to read the poem. So can “lie” and “sol,”
or sun. He asks us to raise our hand toward the sun to cure us;
that’s also a salute. If, instead, we drink the potion, we have
proved ourselves loyal. Lock hem up.
The essential rake.
The essential weed whacker. The essential leaf blower. The essential
mower. The essential nail polisher. The essential hair cutter. The
essential tattoo artist. Image impermanence.
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