Bound less joy

21 November 2022

The dead are too kind. At four, she told her mother she was a boy. He died as Danny, tender of bar and character. But we’re past humanizing the dead. There have been too many of them.

Only the dead collaborate with detectives. The living, with their prerogatives, their plots, disappear into the woods or into themselves. The living fail to make eye contact, for that might reveal something. Anti-maskers are most masked in this context. Leave masks to the old ladies at Safeway; they have nothing to hide.

Shave off a few syllables and the sentence will re-sound. There’s no meaning in word rhythms, but there’s none without them either. This is one way to write on a day like this, making a form of self-contradiction. Diction has its price. The poet speaks of a grid inside of which he hung his sonnets. He likes sonnets!

The teacher speaks of boundless joy on just the morning I can’t possibly find it. No corner of the house hides such a thing. The dog hasn’t sniffed it out, nor the one cat who sniffs, while the others sound like head colds wanting attention. The feel-by date long past, dust’s small joy sits at the bottom of the column of saltines. You have to borrow on the margin to get the bigger kind; some might call it gambling.

“We stay in touch.” A song inspires the lovers finally to kiss, but we know they can't be together, as the plot demands something else of more complexity. Simple love has no place in a noir detective show, even when it’s coming at you in German. Their kiss is an invitation to a monkey wrench. For 25 points, name the composer of that symphonic bit.

Touching: to be made to feel by an outside input. I am moved by your touching story. Your moving story touches a raw nerve in me. That nerve touches ligament or bone, lights up. B says the fireworks going off at night simply advertise the availability of fireworks for sale.

A neighbor’s truck lacks its license plate and NYY magnet. The NYY wreath that lay outside his fence yesterday is gone, though not the flowers, the best wishes from Young Brothers, the white ribbon’s golden scrawl, Ohana.

She concluded her talk on boundless joy with a poem by Anne Sexton.