5/29/06

The younger one, her dirty blonde hair bound into a knot, complained about the washers, which seemed to fail when she used them. “I hate this laundromat,” she said. “Nothing works.” Although the windows were open, the heat was as ferociously as the hottest summer day. The door beside the dryer wasn’t open to disperse the heat each roaring dryer gave off. A few wives from the neighborhood were doing their laundry at once. One middle-aged man wearing a t-shirt for some racing tournament and a tractor cap complained about the malfunction of the soap dispensers. The handle was jammed. I tried to jimmy it, but didn’t get my money back.

I sprayed the bodily stains on the underwear and the bedsheets as if they would stain the world if I didn’t spray them—the kosher mustard on the beige chamois shirt, along with other signs of uncleanliness. Spots of bleach had turned the sandy chinos the color of mustard I was attempting to spray out of existence on the shirt. Elsewhere the salty discolorations on the underwear, the oilspots on the button-down shirts required repeated treatments. I didn’t want to expose my secrets to the mother and daughter or to the rail-thin man with the tractor cap who was about to leave in a garish bright red muscle-car.

10/24/05 (more worthless crap)

The Alpine tunnel entered by a train
Is the space between the sentences on a page
And the difference between the night and day,

And one day and the next. The point of entry
To the day cannot be that of departure,
Cannot be coordinated by science to be the same.

Logic is a kind of madness that claims the space
Between the sentences committed to the page
That no space appears between the weather,

That the sky upon the earth is the same place
To contemplate, no space between them.
Logic dictates the pressure-zones we cannot see,

And dictates the places we can, that the tunnel
Through which the express train runs continues
With night and the mountain with steep faces

Unavailable to earth-movers or to switch-back roads
Or spirals that eventually touch the shining pinnacle,
A plaque bolted to the center of the summit.

Arguments nebulous as rain wash away
The mountain sides, make the shiny weather
Possible, between one sentence and the other.