Backward Masking Unmasked (11/27/01)

3.
How many messages have I missed, beamed back to me,
because I haven't been here, and the answering machine
wasn't plugged in? Systems of the leaf, of powerlines,
unmediated woods beaten back. Why do they pipe the milk
to dairies like lymph? Wouldn't that be easier
than trucking it in? Where are those rivers of milk
we were promised? Fruits that surprise us
dropping into our hands? finding themselves there,
which never need to be peeled, or plucked from the vine?
How almost voluntarily the flesh segments itself,
allows itself to break with hardly a tear of tissue
or slicing of rind? as if surgery could be done with bare hands,
every ailing organ manipulated to re-assume its harmonious
position in the system? Rivers of milk supposed to pour
above us--we can bathe in it. Look how it breaks on rocks
on which maybe a grey owl peeks, looking for rats or voles,
fanning out in counter-currents on the other side to rejoin itself.
The reign of felicity is when all this will happen.

2.

With an audible crack I slap the receiver in the cradle
whenever the taped message repeats itself about the time-share
or the lakeside two God's-little-acres. I crack the headset
in the cradle when the taped message repeats itself about
the time shares, two weeks a year for the rest of your life.
I calculate what this time-share would be like could I live forever
then dream that I have come for my time-share at the end of time.
And haven't I paid for the privilege? The lodge has gone through several managers.
Only I was left, amid the ice and mist, or was it after fire?
For two weeks of the year I'd made plenty of friends there.
We kidded the live ones about health scares, or said how good we looked.
I'd gone through enough, seen a city vanish in a plume of water,
witnessed its facades become unrecognizable, and the friends
who'd been strangers became familiar ghosts from lengthy unacquaintance,
but at least I had lived in a world of constants, a single high-rise here,
a hillside with well-groomed paths there, the same hedges or their descendants,
or two brothers, one who followed the other a polite distance during anger
but walked abreast in reconciliation, no matter how long had lasted the grudge,
love must have lasted longer. Would they die in one another's arms?

1.

I am somewhere on a high hill, counting the daisies, and am happy,
happy that I count the daisies, and that I live on the high hill.
Sometimes I go to my friend's house to play. Sometimes they are gone.
Or they are in their house at dinner time, but are not friends anymore.
Sometimes they are there, and when they are, they tell me go ahead and eat.
I will work on a dairy farm someday although I am afraid of cows.
In the road around the house is a deer, some bulldozers, and the sun
telling everyone to be happy, and plants that are special
just as I am special. Special is to not be with the others.