Meditation 90

 

29 August 2020

She plucks sticky twigs off other people’s cars; picks fallen blossoms off the short grass; we walk our dogs at the same time most mornings. She’s stopped talking to me, steers her dog into the parking lot when I approach, steps behind a tree out of my line of sight. I fear I’ve offended you, I said ten days ago, as she walked past. She did not like the way I had talked to her the last time, she said, and I apologized to her back as she walked away. “Shunning—that primal form of human social organization based on the purity / pollution taboo split.” Today I walk up the hill with Lilith, taking photos of red and orange arrows painted on the sidewalk, the words "ONE CALL," and a violet bush. I run into a man whose dog is named Murphy; the man has gray hair and wears a cap with the word “jazz” on it. “I can’t wait until that orange glob is out of there,” he says. Murphy loves the balls whose paths cannot be predicted. He chases them in the park by the swimming pool. Our neighbor in the Navy is losing his grandmother back east. They’re giving her morphine, and she’s talking again. That happens toward the end, I say, and he nods. He drank too much last night. A woman I argued politics with waves from across the road; her large brown dog stares at us. I can’t think about depression and spirituality in poetry this morning, only about instances of encounter. It’s a list without logic, a logic buried in examples that mask it. She almost said “mask” at the RNC, but used the word “facade” instead. The cemetery worker who called COVID a hoax now says it’s real but no attempts to avoid it work. He tells us not to put on our masks. His co-worker, who feeds the cats, said motorcycle accidents were classified as COVID to make money for hospitals. We wave, say good morning. Even when I try to write it straight, the stories tangle up. The closer to fiction you get, the more it’s taken as fact, and fact has a bad name anyway. We may not be post rhetoric, but we’re past its effects. Sound waves approach the shells that are our ears and fall apart. I see pieces of language on the sidewalk, catch particles of sound. You cannot be persuaded by broken poetry.