Board games

 

29 June 2022

The president with a pitchfork in the House. The president’s chief with a phone on a couch in the West Wing. The president’s fan with an AR-15 in a tree on the Mall. The president’s lawyer with shoe polish running down his cheek. The president’s daughter with an immobile face. The witness, seen from above, at a table surrounded by penitents, photographers. There is a line she will not cross, spry cordage of her conscience sitting, in shock, at the end. Where did she find that fine line? Did it trip her one day as she crossed her living room, as if she were a goat, and the wire live? Did it reach around to grab her clavicles, depriving her of air’s ideologies? Did she wash it off the wall, the line of ketchup left by the president?

I with some pixels, turning my digital soil. The word for circumstance in Greek is also the word for misfortune. In such circumstances, the president might have appeared before congress as a shaman, furs slung over his bare chest and belly, chanting to rid the place of the history we used to tell of it. “They had spears at the ends of their flag poles,” he told her. Brass knucks, bear spray. When things get weird, just say they remind you of a movie.

Not a poem. Not another poem, Speaker Pelosi. The other side has no poems; they know how weak they are. Forget inner strength and courage. Let them through the mags, with their illegal magazines and their MAGA hats. How to assimilate such knowledge without poems? The flagpole is a line. You use it either to hang a piece of cloth or to beat up a cop. In both instances, you call yourself patriot.

Among her revelations, her boss twice closed the door on her while on the phone. That is only invitation to revelation. Premonitions of the recent past, the lawyer’s happy question: are you excited about the sixth? When asked if you support a peaceful transfer of power, the general said, “Fifth.” The purveyor of the whiskey bar disappeared after that election. He knew.

She asked me if I was a visitor, meaning tourist. Where are you getting off the bus, I asked the man, and he said he’d know when he got there. My student thought the bus a church, complete with nave and altar, if lacking shocks. Absorb everything; it will get wrung out of you. My memory shall be an aid to my forgetting.