6/17/02 (more worthless crap)

The vestibule of the bedouin tent was large enough to stand upright.
But the pup-tent I raised on the lawn was not high enough to stand in.

Although the cross winds that blew through the flaps inflated it.
Healthy crosswinds keep the apartment cool, by summer standards
Night is cool as day is hot: nothing on the ground absorbs the heat.
Can you imagine actually living in a tent in a KOA campground?
The subject changed to the Ellis Island website.

Somewhere on it were my grandparents in their teens.
I sealed the tent except for the breathing hole, square skein
beneath a sky without the irregularities of cloud, no sunset-pink tinges.

I wondered about the tents of the bedouins embroidered with camel hair, cool as cathedrals with nothing on the ground to orient you
except the sun-track. And unzipped my Coleman pup-tent.
The virgin smell of glue and plastic smelled like pine cones.
The heat made the lawn thick and irregular. A Chinese adage says
no wrong place for grass –
a week of fog, then rain and sun had made it run riot.
It seized the land,filled the desolation with irregularity,
like raiders who prey on oases: grass isn't native.

On the website was a record of my grandparents
and the port of departure through which everyone passed,
unless they passed through Hamburg. Grass seized desolation.
The spelling of their names in the record is irregular.
Closing the tent I inhabit a sterile, geometric form.

The sky without a vestibule is a square net of nylon,
and without clouds, a kind of desolation hangs
like heavens of golden hair decorating a Bedouin’s tent.
On a fair day grass grows with the fury of irregular cells,
raging with the irregularity that thrives on decoration
deserts that were grass, until cattle ate the tender portions
and the goats ate the brambles. If a tent rises there,
it is from your bare hands crossed with bridle marks,
a craft that rests with confidence in desolation
raising a tent woven with the respite of a dark interior and the planets.