what didn't come in the mail today: Saint Hello of the Looms in midnight, tango or egg.

As if this weekend were all strings and no theory, an expedited passport can go virtually missing with a shrug “computer’s down.” Where armed guards stand in front of a triumvirate of frames: W-Cheney-Condi. Have no overreaction. Or is it Mercury racketeering. Friday the passport turns up. Pause for food-borne illness. Embarkation for Monday back on. The flight is boarded. Then late. Then last in line on the runway. Then subject to a perilous rain. Three hours on a tarmac and finally revelry at the sound of motors. The sound of motors horribly wrong. This flight is being cancelled in Spanish due to engine malfunction. Nothing else is known. Embarkation for airport to pick up He of the Tarmac Day and another halting. Moments after his car accident the motorist is facing me southbound in 5 northbound lanes. His look of surrender before emergency crews arrive. Thinking about time and how I used to confuse coincidence with consequence in a spelling grade. My signaling past the debris. Airport. Home. Late. We are the only neighbors with windows open. We do not prefer climate control and so are the few or only to hear the first screams that I mistake for a small dog but then become Help and the mismatched sounds of high heels and speed. We call. We are witnesses. A witness rescheduled to fly today.

"If today and today I am speaking to you, or
if you/I whisper, touch, explain"
rhythmically reminds me of this game
(picture below) also realizing
more prominence than I sensed before
of a Stevens in Gizzi's tree

Easy to see how people get consumed with the meaninglessness of work. Meaninglessness, OK. Work, something to do in retreat. Attempting to surface with grant-making to Japan (Japan, please have me), well foretold, I think, by a dream earlier this week in which I am serving sake to Mr. T. Also, in bike ride along the lake and an all day spent outdoors and Ethiopian free jazz. Also, in gallery-ing night to a cavernous warehouse of electrified cellos playing in dark corners and canvases and white walls making a thin, new guise over hulking structures of industry. And then to a gutted bar down the street where a painter in bankruptcy hung his work under rusted punched-tin ceiling nymphs, in a room also adorned by a refrigerator and a column of BTU’s. The story of his life a study in echo- living in towns with the same name, creditors, creditors. So less easy train reads and US magazine on the treadmill. Must get back to throwing heat.

Yesterday granted admittance to one of the church megaplexes I'd only read about. It's astonishingly true, in the case of intimate spiritual experience, Americans are saying "supersize me." Though the distance of the carpark offered a pedestrian experience rarely known in big boxlandia, one my stagnating arteries welcomed, it was insisted that we board a triple-trailer golf cart for our door-to-door conveyance. An anatomy of zippers were tended to ensure our staying dry beneath a plastic sheath fitted over our battery-powered omnibus. I hollered out to our good Xtian driver as I was nearly mowed down off the back end of our caravan by a good Xtian Cutlass rampaging out of a handicapped parking space. Taking the curb a little faster than would be ordinarily prudent, he narrowly avoided my consumption by Oldsmobile. Praise him. Once inside it was clear that I had entered the new American cultural frontier (still under construction). Retail, cafe and plentiful symptoms of branding dotted the polis ensconcing the stadium-like center of the holy business. The edition of the Bible speckling every pew featured a handy index one could quickly access for the Biblical antidote to host of maladies including peer pressure and divorce. Once the commencement was under way, it was clear from our distance that we would be relying one of the three jumbotrons for our virtual participation. Since I always travel with a tech expert, it was duly noted that the mic'ing did not account for the delay ensured by the cavernous space, so the lips and voices of the speakers moved with subtle disembodiment.
Caps. Gowns. Speeches. Brief thought of returning to earn the velvet beret and bell sleeves. Oh horse feathers.
Later, one may inquire of the nine-year-old about her vocabulary list for the week which includes "Richter Scale" and "seismograph" beside a layer cake buckling with a raspberry subduction zone.
We are given a camera with a perpetually open shutter. My feeling exactly.

Tenure never looked so unglorious as when someone being forced out must accept a token hunk of crystal beside a photo of himself on an easel with his bio, in a room lined in illuminated glass cabinets full of jade curio and the tightly stitched who utter “interesting” and “extraordinary” and speeches, and other empty pageantry that only a wine bar makes tolerable.

Poetry saturation point reached lately, or due to feelings of general atomization, it’s a retreat to prose. Reading Selections from the Journals of Thoreau recollects an early college flutter, and here where an imminent t-storm shakes an awning, awnings of Arigato, thanks, a place, thinking of the daily stream of places as a novel of many thanks. A sentiment that offers one a chair, a mirror to sit beside, a neon outline of a fish, a view of a copy store across the street. Where the door is left open for a moist wind and the paper shades hung from the ceiling wobble slightly, thinking if stars could stumble there would be a resemblance there. Someone has already made a simile of it anyway. I am alone except for a man waiting to cut a fish, a starched version of the Brandenburg Concerto and a server that punctuates every phrase with “today,” making every fulfillment of one’s request decidedly temporal. It’s been too long, or seems, since the continuous present and I have checked in. The minutes remind me, made audibly similar by refrigeration’s drone. Me and Henry David Thoreau.

I’m like so busy
with work
mostly, not mine but a surprise
technically writing, I like
forgot language
could be so orderly, kind
of like a miniature
variety, miniature
and tone deaf, erect in no kind
of dickinson way, just
so. like what ever
happened to that stencilled
alphabet that was all the packaging
generic could hope for? the beautiful
symmetry of its aisle in spite of variety:
potato chips, lima beans ration the alphabet
unobstructed, a favorite
memory works really,
not mine

History lately inflects my hardly waking, my effort at present, presence— is that a cardinal overhead or a dragon belief derived from fossil remains? Is this humid chill a Lake Nemi of houseboats, Calligulan, Diana afleet?

Instead of falling into the train for the second half of a morning sleep, where doors close and take us with them and an announcement is enough to rattle my clothes— time, news, briefly forgiving the car in which Alyssa Milano reads Anne Bradstreet.

miraculous, part 2

Move over Thatcher.. (miraculous, part 1)