4. Born
The year of my birth followed by a hyphen, by the solace of expectation, by a small measure of success, by a teasing out of hopelessness and of course, by another date yet to be fixed.
5. Style
Would he have leaped from the stern of the Orizaba, at noon on April 27, 1932 if hed known of the unfashionable rise in sea-levels 70 years hence; Hart Crane, a rhetorical gesture, surely?
6. Beachcomber
Pampiniform it writhes, bladder-wrack or kelp, a heavy swell that slops about rustily in the basalt trough, breaking through the sea rush; & solitary goes Heaney, curling at dictions.
Transgenic Pigs
The oink is a fugue, Baconian and philosophical. By a corncob moon they snaffle, silvery-hulled backs adrift & dolphin-arched in the mire. A litter of stars in the laboratory-bright sky. PUT SOME PORK ON YOUR FORK intones the television commercial. O but but these are no bristle & foam flecked boars of Arcadian Days, brutally twisting on some Danaan spearhaft, in a flying rage tearing at ilex roots, or blasting marble shards with iron-tough tusks. These are the sleek-lined, chrome-bright & delicate trottered. These with a call soothing as a computer bleat, ears alert as mobile phones, flesh pliable as an artichoke, temperament cool as a cold cut. These, the upwardly mobile, porcine delicacies, models of dinner-table decorum. Designer-label pigs, feted, wined & dined exemplars of taste, accepted in the most refined of social circles. These are the well-appointed pigs replete, with a privately funded education bred O so exclusively for the Export Drive.
Sheet Music
Like some murky storm that presages pain, or engine that mauls the curb, the stereo wallows its bass notes at the top of the head, lands soft as afterbirth. If you place a white sheet over America 500 Indian Nations show like bloodspots, said Jim Harrison at Lake Superior, the buffalo and the Big Trees gone too. Greed! Mostly, beauty is nostalgia. The random motes of a rainbow end up on the garbage heap again. These sticks which encase the Great Lakes, Jim, are the Happy Hunting ground for the likes of you & me. Men picking on the chance sounds of emptiness. The daily round of campfire, man and nature, etc. A moon patient as an escalator, maybe. Its all been done before, anyhow. What was that about Indians leaving a flaw in the fabric for the soul to escape? Ours is the gift of factory seconds, well-made & well-meant through to a public we detest if you think about it. And the quickest way to solitude is via a four wheel drive, eh? Theres comfort in that mate, getting out.