2/24/06

The kraft paper kite plunges into the kitchen garden
but doesn't bruise the bean-stalks or the squash.
The kite of sticks and strings rides the air and ripples
noisily. All edicts against kite-flying have fallen.
You can't disinter mandrake roots or other tubers
or pluck the Turkish fig before it's dried and candied over
enough to settle into a market stall, whether in a bazaar
or the supermarket's whole foods section. Certain names
for the deity may also be off-limits, entertainer's jibes
at El or Alilat. Purple phalloi of some plants are suppressed.
Even the turnip piled in the truck can appear concupiscent,
once the dirt is shaken from its rugged beard. The rhizome,
impossible to find, hops without a central nervous system.
A facsimile sent by email barely squeezes through the lines
of the telephone, reduced to dots and dashes.
The last telegram was sent yesterday,
and the cocaine-fueled raging day-trader ruined the ticker-tape.
Bring a pretty glass bell and someone is bound to smash it.
Treaties are composed to be broken as symphonies to be played.
Silence and random sounds were meant for compositions,
the space between a note is shaped like a sand-dune.

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I could feel the delicacy of the thing in the package
inside the big cardboard envelope, an earring for a fairy
a small fairy whose wings were spread in full flight
a pendant in the shape of a fairy dangling from the ear-lobe
It felt like one earring, maybe two, but not likely
and that maybe fairy-earrings were attached to a chain
a slender chain pouring from the hand that dispensed it
to which the earrings were attached, very delicate fairies of beaten gold
or gold-plated brass that I threw in the shark's cage in the warehouse,
its steel latches beaten into unpredictable shapes that didn't fit well,
and threw the heavier gifts on top of the earrings or whatever they were.
This is what happens to vulnerable children, with weak heads and butterfly stomachs.