Meditation 107

24 December 2020

Make stark distinctions only, the better to knock one down like an egg from a wall, or a wall in a strong wind. If reparations come in the guise of prizes, then what to do with runners-up? In England, they’re called ladders, the runs on stockings. Our stocking suffers from a hole in its large toe, the one that stands in for five of them. Five makes a team in some sports, so long as they’re tall. All numbers are magical. He tells me he won’t take the vaccine, because no one knows the side-effects yet; his mother won’t until she’s assured no aborted babies were used to make it. It should be his choice, he says, and besides, things are pretty good here. If he lived on the mainland, he might. Fundamentalist ethics are as relative as any. We guard our relatives least, because at least we’ll be loving them to death. Thank you, she writes of her uncle's beautiful dying. I saw a green canvas cover attached to a metal frame around a vacant hole in the cemetery. Seven in one year. Family comes to sit in folding chairs at graves neatly marked by tiny picket fences. One man said the Lord brought us a beautiful day. The brightest light in months, mountains a jagged line across the azur sky, framed by Lilith’s ears. More talk here of paving the green spaces. They get torn up in the rainy season, that of mud wasps and scars. Asphalt's more permanent, scab without a wound bursting at each turn of the cart. 300,000 in, he golfs. Pardon is what pardon does. “It was disgusting, and I’m from New Jersey,” the ex-governor says of the president’s son-in-law’s father. All within the law. The cemetery worker asked me if I’d read the Constitution, and I said yes. We shake our heads about the fresh grave up the hill. Dharma blossoms turning. When I said I’d taken photos of her purple flower in a pot full of water and algae, she said, “but it wasn’t fully out yet.”