from Startles

In the everything makes sense department, the Temple’s enlarged black parking lot fills with orange cones and “compact only” spaces, each separated by a line of fresh white paint. No need to up the contrast. A lone chair sits on the grass, lone cat beside it. I ask where the tourist buses will park. “Behind that line of cones,” one worker says.

The line of cones in front of “compact only” spaces? Yes. The woman at the front gate says where there were two rows for buses, now there will only be one. “They need five people back there now to figure out what’s going on.” A line of temple-colored bird houses stood where only compacts dare park.

In the everything makes sense department, the White House now resembles Gaza. Who saved the furniture, the windows, the wooden floors? Who removed the archives? Where will tourists go, whose entrance was into that wing? A huge American flag droops over broken concrete.

Who needs metaphor now, when rubble is rubble, and history’s washed away with water hoses or blood? Susan Howe’s “rubble couple” denoted the end, but at least they had each other. Tree stumps on the cemetery’s hillside sprout new branches. The same “rubbish trees.” You don’t have to weed, if you replace plants with stones, says my worker friend.

In the everything makes sense department, I suggest that the cemetery’s boss has taken over landscaping for the White House. “I don’t pay attention to that,” the woman at the front gate says; “it gets to me.” The trees are coming down, the grass being paved over, roses getting cut out. It gets to them, these living beings inhabiting a symbolic space. If you tear down the space, the symbol goes with it; that’s the thought.

In the everything makes sense department, the homeless of DC were taken away, the men at “Alligator Alcatraz” disappeared when it closed, and the rubble will doubtless be sold at a profit, like the Berlin Wall. It hardly matters for what the symbol stood, it stands for him who sells it. And the rubble will turn to gold, like water into wine. And donors will come from far and near, bearing myrrh and incense, chips and crypto, to dine with the ballroom’s money changers. Senators must make do with goodie bags given them by the Orange King.