The eyes are the first thing to go: more Instagram epigrams
I’ve taken to walking all the way down and back up the mile-and-a-half-long Plummer’s Hollow Road every day now, and what’s curious is that, despite having walked this road many thousands of times in my life, I still notice two or three new things every time. You can see a lot just by looking, as Yogi Berra supposedly said. Of course, most of what I see are trees. And many observations don’t make good photos — but a few do. And by the time I get back to the house, sometimes I’ve thought up a caption as well.
The eyes are the first thing to go, melting back into the head, murmurs my lover, the undertaker’s assistant.
Poison ivy is best recognized by its disguises, the way it mistakes familiarity for abuse.In dreams, everything is in the process of becoming something else. In nature, too.There are words no one has a word for and things no one has a thing for yet.Whatever wings I once dreamt I had have dwindled to an occasional shrug.I knew a lumberman who was afraid to walk in the forest. A tree might fall on you, he said.On the Day of the Dead, I don gloves and drench my trousers in Permethrin.Truly nomadic thinking is like a map of the world: impossible to reproduce on dead tree media without distortion.A paper heart is nothing without that fold demarcating systole and diastole, call and response.More than merely rewriting the past, nostalgia overwrites it with longing for a time when time didn’t pass.Evil is such a growth area. Why would I not see, hear or speak it?Where I live, you can’t see the horizon, but the harsh croaks of ravens echo wonderfully.We grow so comfortable within our walls we no longer believe we’re in prison.It’s not that we’re dead. It’s just that the lives we harbor are no longer our own.
“Bahookie Bladder Blather”
(for Donald Trump — in the aftermath)
The speech of pee
instantly instigates
the tinkle of music,
but the dick of death
dismembers the embers
of December.
***
Brilliant. and strangely comforting.