Friday, April 24, 2020

Meditation 46



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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